


Infection

by rebooting



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Genre: Abduction, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kryptonite, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-09-18 12:28:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 44,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9385145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebooting/pseuds/rebooting
Summary: Rather than being killed by Doomsday, Clark is badly wounded, and infected with kryptonite that has been corrupted via Doomsday's blood. In the aftermath of the fight, with nobody realising the extent of the damage, Clark and Bruce attempt to build something like a working friendship, with Bruce shrugging off the alterations in Clark's behaviour as post-traumatic reaction from having been nearly killed, until Clark, who has been giving in to urges to take what he really wants regardless of the cost to other people, decides to take something he's been wanting since the fight: Batman.See author notes at the beginning of each chapter for additional content notes. Update schedule will be every second week. The character death tag is for referenced, past character death, rather than character death in-story.





	1. I really don't mind what happens now and then as long as you'll be my friend at the end

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing really to note in this chapter, aside from Bruce's usual failing to deal with his issues and some discussion of PTSD.

For a brief, terrible moment after the creature Luthor had made dropped Superman, they'd thought that the stab to his chest had killed him. Bruce was sure it would have killed anyone who wasn't a Kryptonian; the wound was deep and ugly, and he wasn't sure that it didn't go all the way through Superman's chest. But when the creature finally stilled and Bruce and Diana were able to get close enough to Superman to see how badly he was hurt, things became clearer, and Bruce could breathe again.

It was bad, that much was undeniable. It _had_ gone all the way through, but the claw had been tapered; the exit wound was almost neat, and a damn sight smaller than the gaping hole in Superman's chest. Bruce ripped strips from his cloak to stem the bleeding, but even from the entry wound, the blood wasn't running as terribly as it should have. There was some sort of residue coating the ragged edges of the wound, a glittering greenish-brown that sank into the red of Superman's blood and seemed to make it clot faster.

Bruce had no idea whether that was a good thing or a bad thing in the long term, but in the short term, Superman wasn't bleeding out in his arms, and _that_ had to be a good thing, didn't it?

They wrapped him in his cloak and Bruce carried him from the scene, leaving Lois and Diana, who promised to control what the media knew. Superman needed attention, and Bruce wasn't going to stand still giving soundbite-friendly interviews when he could be doing something _useful_. Superman already knew who he was, and _he'd_ met Superman's mother that night; the boundaries of secrecy were well and truly broken by now, even if Bruce didn't know Martha as anything _but_ Martha. He bundled him into the Batwing and took him to the lake house, which had been fitted out with a top-of-the-line medical suite years ago, when Alfred had informed Bruce that he was _not_ going to steal any more blood from the hospital, thank you very much. Bruce might not know exactly how to help an alien, but he was pretty sure the hospital wouldn't either, and at least this way Superman could keep his privacy from the wider world.

It took too long for Superman to wake up. "Too long" was any time at all, if Bruce was honest with himself, and Bruce liked to think he was reasonable at being honest with himself (at least, as far as _some_ things went; he wasn't too good at being honest with himself about feelings and his own personal reactions to things), and after the third day the Bat went and had words with some senators about how Superman would probably want that ship back in _his_ hands, considering all the trouble Lex Luthor had got up to with it, and got the thing quarantined until Superman was in a fit state to deal with it himself.

And in the process, got himself a copy of the ship's databank, because there had to be _something_ in there that could help him treat Superman. So far, all he was doing was making sure the wound didn't get infected and try to figure out what to do if it turned out the Kryptonian needed a blood transfusion. Saline solution could only do so much, and _that_ was only if he could get it into Superman to begin with. He didn't want to introduce kryptonite into the equation again, not unless there was no other choice.

Unfortunately, the databanks didn't exactly come in English, or any of the other handful of languages Bruce understood to varying degrees of competency. He could set up a translation program, but without a baseline - a Rosetta Stone, so to speak - it was going to be slow going. He'd have to work out how to help some other way.

Four days after Doomsday he figured out that sunlight was probably going to help. In his defence, Gotham wasn't exactly known for its bright, sunny days, and it was only the combination of a rare cloudless day and the medical suite's windows being on the east side of the lake house that gave him the clue. After being bathed in sunlight for half a day, the wound in Superman's chest had undergone more healing than it had in the previous three days. Bruce uncovered it, ignoring his instincts that he was exposing Superman to infection by leaving a still-open wound uncovered, and hit the controls for the skylights, flooding the room with sunlight.

The forecast for the next two days was sunny. He left the blinds in the medical suite open to the sun, and on the seventh day, Superman began to come out of what Bruce had been refusing to call a coma.

He'd clearly told Lois who the Bat was, because she'd been calling for updates, even if she'd been polite enough to not show up on Bruce's doorstep demanding to be let in. Bruce could accept that, because Lois and Superman obviously had _something_ going on; nobody ran into a fight between a super-powered man and someone in a batsuit with glowing eyes unless they had personal reasons for being there. And Lois had clearly told _Martha_ , who had also been calling and making veiled probes as to whether _Bruce_ had anyone looking after him when he'd dutifully told her that he was doing everything he could for her son - Clark, she'd eventually said, saying it was ridiculous for them both to keep calling him Superman when Bruce was talking to _his mother_. Bruce didn't mind Martha knowing, either. She'd kept Clark's secret for as long as he'd been operating as Superman; she clearly knew how important anonymity was.

Diana didn't stop by, too busy chasing up the information he'd found about the other metahumans, but that was fine. Bruce wanted _somebody_ looking for them as soon as possible, and she was probably the better person to talk to them. He tended to rub people the wrong way, whether he was being Bruce Wayne or the Bat. He'd lost the gift of charm somewhere along the way.

When Clark rose from coma to a more natural sleep, Bruce let Lois and Martha know and moved his base of operations from his office to the medical bay. Before then, there hadn't been much point in sitting a bedside vigil; the monitors would let him know when there was a change in Clark's condition, and there'd been work to do, cleaning things up after the last few weeks. Bruce Wayne had bought a few more newspapers and TV stations and told them that he thought they could do with a few human interest stories and nudged them towards people who would make it easier for Clark to ease back into work after he got better. He still had his issues with the idea of an all-powerful being hanging around on Earth, but he could admit that he'd been wrong on at least some of the score, and he was pretty sure that Clark wouldn't have been hurt so badly if he hadn't already been weakened from all the kryptonite Bruce had been fighting him with. He had amends to make, and if that meant a bit of positive propaganda, he could swing that.

Now, though, Clark was going to wake up any time soon, and Bruce didn't think it was a good idea for him to wake up alone in a strange place. He didn't want the roof to get blasted off in a fit of panic, after all. That was it.

That was it, wasn't it?

He was going through some files on his tablet when Clark finally moved, sitting up and letting out a quiet groan. Bruce set the tablet down and reached out to put his hand on Clark's shoulder, less _keeping_ him from sitting up and more indicating that it was _really_ not a good idea. The chest would had healed much more rapidly since Bruce had started letting Clark bathe in the sunlight all day, but it was still bad enough that Bruce was fairly sure any unexpected movement was going to be a bad idea.

Clark winced, settling back against the bed, and blinked at him. "Bruce?"

"You're at my place," Bruce said, going for the information he figured Clark would want to know. "Lois and Martha are both fine; they've been asking about you. I'll have a car sent for them when you're up for seeing them. I assumed you'd prefer private treatment to a hospital where your identity could be uncovered."

"I - yes. You're right. Thank you." Clark looked down at his chest, gingerly touching the bandage over the wound; Bruce re-covered it every evening when the sun went down, unwilling to risk too much even in the relative sterility of the medical suite. "How bad was it?"

Bruce swallowed. "Bad. You've been out for a week."

Clark's eyes widened in shock. It might have been relieving to know he could feel such a human emotion, any other time. "A _week_?"

"Luthor's _thing_ got a claw right through you," Bruce said gruffly, looking down at his tablet again. It held Clark's biometric scans, the dozens of readings he'd done on the healing injury, how close it had come to the heart. He cleared his throat. "Missed the heart by a fraction of an inch, and it left a hell of a hole behind. You still need to take it easy. Get lots of sun."

Now, Clark looked a little amused. "I see you figured _that_ part out." He hesitated, then asked, "The fallout. How bad is it?"

Bruce shrugged. "Not as bad as it could be. Lois and the _Planet_ are doing some pretty hefty damage control, and enough people saw us fighting that thing that they're willing to forget that a week ago, they were suspecting you of terrorism."

There was venom in his voice as he said that. He'd thought that Clark was a danger, that he might one day leverage his power to take control, take whatever he wanted, but he'd never stooped to thinking that Clark would use _bombs_. Someone who had built himself up as a god would take control by a cult of personality, by steps of reasonableness, not by sudden, violent force. Violence would wait until he was sure of his position.

He shook his head, dislodging that thought. He'd told himself to stop thinking of Clark that way, and for the most part, he had. He was still uncomfortable with Clark's power, and he wasn't sure he'd ever be _comfortable_ with it, but hell, he wasn't really comfortable with Diana's power either. He did plenty of things he wasn't _comfortable_ with. His comfort had stopped being a factor a long time ago.

"Lois did some investigating," he added, giving Clark something that approximated a smile. "You can't have been responsible for the bomb; the inside of the chair was sheathed with lead. They're willing to take that as proof that someone wanted you to be unaware of it."

Clark grunted, not asking who "they" were, which was probably a good thing, because Bruce didn't have an answer for that. "They" changed hour by hour in his life these days, depending on what was going on. It was enough that the world wasn't setting effigies of Superman on fire anymore. Mob outrage was dangerous, for more than just the person that the mob was angry with.

"We've arranged for Clark Kent to have been injured in the fallout," Bruce continued, giving Clark a sidelong look. Was being this quiet normal? He didn't have enough experience with the man to know, but it was vaguely concerning him. Still, he _had_ just woken up from a week-long coma after getting stabbed in the chest by a Kryptonian-human monstrosity; Bruce could forgive a bit of taciturnity. "The _Daily Planet_ isn't expecting you back for a while, and they'll be liaising through Martha until you're up to going back. Nobody's going to begrudge you taking time off after _that_."

"You've thought of everything, haven't you," Clark said quietly, more than asked. He smiled then, a genuine smile, even if it was strained. "Thank you. A regular hospital wouldn't have known what to do with me, and probably wouldn't have been able to keep paparazzi out."

"And your identity is a valuable commodity," Bruce agreed. "It's no problem. You can recuperate here."

Clark looked around the room, his expression one of slight distaste, and asked, "Do I have to recuperate _right_ here?"

Bruce hesitated, but as long as Clark kept the wound clean, there was no _real_ reason to keep him in the medical suite, was there? The rest of his readings were - well, Bruce didn't know what they were, mostly, but he'd managed to wrestle a scan of a healthy Kryptonian out of the ship's database during the past week, and Clark's readings mostly matched those. There were a few things that were off, but nothing that looked alarmingly out, and nothing that Bruce could actually _decipher_. He had no good argument for keeping Clark in the medical suite.

He shrugged. "I'll ask Alfred to make up a guest suite."

 

Lois and Martha visited the next morning. Bruce welcomed them at the door, trying not to notice their awe at the size of the place - the lake house wasn't as big as the manor had been, but it was still bigger than most people's houses - and escorted them to the suite of rooms he'd had Alfred set up for Clark, leaving the three of them to visit, feeling uncomfortably like he was intruding on a family scene.

They'd entertained friends in little, intimate visits like that, once upon a time, but Bruce Wayne never did. The rumour mill flew with speculation about whether it was because he was too possessive of his home to bring people into it readily or because he just didn't _have_ friends.

A while later, Martha found him in his office. She knocked, an illusion of giving him the option of telling her he was busy; she didn't wait for him to tell her to come in or go away before she entered the office, closing the door behind her, and came around the desk to hug him.

It could have been more awkward. He hadn't been sitting at the desk, at least; he'd been standing at the window, looking out over the grounds towards the mausoleum, wondering what his parents would have thought of their home being used as a refuge for a man from another world. Things like that had been the stuff of fiction back when they'd gone to movies and walked through alleys without thinking about the darkness in the world that waited for them.

It was still awkward, even without having to navigate a hug between someone seated and someone standing. Bruce didn't invite touch these days; Bruce Wayne did, when he'd had enough to drink that he thought another warm body in the bed might banish the nightmares for a night, forgetting that it never had in the past. He could tolerate it when he was playing the role, or from his employees, or even when it was unexpected but he was on alert for the unexpected; none of those things were true here. He was on alert in the lake house because he was never _not_ on alert, but he hadn't been unconsciously preparing himself for a _hug_. He almost didn't remember what you were supposed to _do_ when you were hugged, but he managed to bring his arms up and awkwardly pat Martha's back.

Martha, thankfully, seemed to sense his unease and didn't linger; she pulled back from the hug enough to take him by the shoulders and say, in a quiet, strong voice ringing with sincerity, "Thank you for taking care of my son, Bruce."

He wasn't sure what to say to that right away. He didn't do things to be _thanked_. The Bat did things because they were the only way to get justice; _he_ did things because he thought they were the right thing to do, or because they were the least-wrong thing to do in the path to the greater good. He was used to thanks coming in the form of rote letters from the organisations Bruce Wayne donated to, not this intimate gratitude.

Clearing his throat, he offered, "I can get you set up with a room here, if you'd like to stay while he recovers."

Martha waved a hand, but she was smiling. "Don't bother yourself with that. Clark doesn't need me hovering over him."

Bruce couldn't say he wasn't relieved. He was used to the lake house having two people living in it these days; having Clark around was tolerable because Clark had needed medical attention and it was Bruce's way of making up for his part in how Clark had got injured in the first place, but having Clark's _family_ living there would start to brush against wounds that hadn't healed and probably never would. Bruce was self-aware enough to know _some_ of his limitations, and playing happy families with Clark and Lois and Martha over dinner was one of them.

He was grateful when Lois declined the offer to stay as well. Gotham wasn't so far from Metropolis that she couldn't visit, she said, and she had a job to get back to; the _Daily Planet_ was taking on the lion's share of shaping public perception of the last few weeks, and she wanted to be a driving force behind it.

"Besides," she said, smiling, "Clark doesn't want me pestering him when he's not feeling well. I don't want him pestering me when I'm not feeling well either. We're both terrible patients."

That could have boded poorly for Bruce's patience, except that nobody was a worse patient than he was, according to Alfred. He could handle Clark.

Now that he was up and about, Clark spent the days on one deck or another, soaking in the sunlight that would help him heal faster, due to whatever quirk of biology it was that gave him his powers in the first place. Bruce checked on him every couple of hours, and checked the wound every evening when Clark came in, gleaming from the sun and looking as though he'd never been in a fight in his life if not for the bandage on his chest. He'd been awkward about not wearing a shirt, the first day, but Bruce had pointed out that he'd need to get as much sunlight as he could, and it was no more indecent than sunbathing at the beach.

Something that Clark had evidently never done, judging by the colour his cheeks turned, but he didn't argue any further, shucking off his shirt and relaxing on the chair Bruce had set up on the deck, reaching for his paperback.

He insisted on eating dinner together, saying it was _rude_ not to dine with his host. Using those exact words. Bruce, who viewed food as something that was useful as fuel but otherwise as interesting as watching paint dry, asked Alfred to make sure there was something that Clark should find palatable, having grown up on good old-fashioned home cooking in small-town Kansas. Alfred gave him a raised eyebrow and a mutter about _now_ you care about cooking, but at least the meals seemed to meet with Clark's approval, even if Bruce's stilted attempts at returning Clark's conversational endeavours didn't.

Bruce wasn't used to having someone who wasn't Alfred in _his_ space. That was natural. Maybe not everybody's space involved an entire lake house, but Bruce's did, and having Clark around, even when he was on the deck outside his guest suite and Bruce was across the house in his office, made everything feel _different_. Not necessarily _bad_. Just different.

The Bat's activities died down somewhat during Clark's convalescence, but they didn't go away altogether, and he shouldn't have been too surprised to find Clark waiting for him when he got back one night - one morning, more like, a couple of hours before dawn, aching from the fight but tired in a way that would let him _sleep_ for a few hours. Clark raised an eyebrow and Bruce gave him a tired glare, tugging off his cowl and tossing it over in front of the case that held his suit when he wasn't using it.

He didn't like that Clark was in the Cave. He'd been toying with the idea of bringing him down here sometime soon, just so Clark would know what sort of tools were at Bruce's disposal - they were allies now, of sorts, weren't they? Allies should know that sort of thing about each other - but it bothered him that Clark had come down of his own accord, without an invitation. It felt off somehow, in a way he couldn't put his finger on.

He could figure the logic behind it, though. It didn't take a genius to figure out that Clark didn't like his methods any more than he liked the notion of someone with super powers. Just because they'd been getting along lately and _weren't_ trying to kill each other didn't mean that that unease with what the other was doing would just go away.

Clark let out a sigh that sounded almost _huffy_. "Let me take a look at you."

"I'm fine," Bruce growled. He wasn't, exactly, but he'd had far worse than what he'd picked up tonight. This was just bruises, maybe a couple of fractures in his off-hand that would heal well enough, going by experience, even if they left him with another weather ache to join all the others. By his standards, that _was_ fine.

Hurt flickered through Clark's eyes, like he was upset that his offer of help had been turned away, and then he said, "You know where to find me if you need me," before turning and heading back upstairs.

Good. Bruce peeled off the suit, kicking it aside - Alfred would hang it up later, and grumble at him about it, but _that_ was as much routine as going out and putting someone away in a fight brutal enough to let him get some sleep was, and they'd both miss it if he started getting considerate and putting his clothes away himself. Down here, the shower was just as palatial as the one in his room upstairs, but this one didn't have gleaming fixtures and blinding white tile and it didn't remind him of the day life that he had to keep up. Showering in the Cave was as much an unmasking as removing his cowl and suit; it let him leave the Bat behind and become Bruce again, just like the suits and smiles let him be the Bruce Wayne that the world expected.

Probably, he thought vaguely as he soaped himself down, easing over the bruises and cataloguing each sore spot, normal people didn't have three different personas that they used with the world depending on the situation. But he'd known for a long time that he wasn't a normal person.

He managed to get a few hours of unbroken sleep, and then joined Clark for a late breakfast. Clark watched him over his scrambled eggs until Bruce snapped, " _What_."

"You could have asked for backup."

Clark sounded so comically _hurt_ about it that Bruce had to laugh. Not a big, belly laugh like it was really funny; just a little snort, because the mental image of Superman beating up some drug-running thugs was too ludicrous to really consider.

"You're still healing," he pointed out. It wasn't as much of an excuse as it would have been a week ago; the wound in Clark's chest was almost completely healed now, although the skin was discoloured in a way that Bruce didn't like. He took a long sip of his coffee, adding, "And you don't work on my level, Clark. You save people from natural disasters and warlords. I work on the streets, not in the skies."

It wasn't like there was any self-loathing in what he was saying; it was bare, simple truth. Gotham City couldn't trust its police department to do what was needed, because the police were either corrupt, scared, or powerless in the face of higher-ups with agendas, so it needed someone on the street level. Maybe, one day, someone political would make the changes necessary that would make the Bat obsolete, but Bruce wasn't holding his breath. He could live with being a vigilante if it kept the invisible people safe. Clark was there for the people who lived in the light.

Clark sighed. "Will you do me a favour? Just... promise to call if you need anything. Please?"

Damn it if he didn't have good puppy-dog eyes. Bruce gave a non-committal shrug, but he knew he'd call if it came to it. He'd done enough harm to Clark already; if letting him swoop in and save the day sometimes when Bruce could have handled it, albeit with a few more broken bones than he'd really prefer, then Bruce would swallow his pride and make the call.

 

A month after Doomsday, there was nothing but a scar, discoloured and ugly, to show that Clark had ever been injured. Bruce was still concerned that it had taken that long for Clark to heal, considering he'd recovered within _minutes_ of _being nuked_ \- something he was still not happy about, and something that he was damn well going to hold a grudge about - but maybe it had been something to do with how he'd been injured, or _where_. God knew he had every excuse to take his time recovering, anyway.

When Clark left the lake house to return to Metropolis, Bruce asked Alfred to clean up the guest suite Clark had used and went to his office, opening up the program he'd been running that entire month to try to decipher the ship's databank. It'd had some success; Bruce was able to decipher some of the more mundane text, and that made it easier for him to plug data into the program that should, in theory, make the complete translation that much faster.

It'd be easier, of course, if he could just access the ship's databank in person, but he'd told Clark about the ship the second day he'd been awake, and he was pretty sure it was off-limits now. He wasn't sure he wanted to go inside it, anyway. Aliens were still something that he was wrapping his brain around, and it had spawned Luthor's _thing_. A personal tour could wait until Clark had taken it in hand and made sure there were no lingering traces of Luthor's personality left.

Clark came over that Friday. Bruce blinked at him standing on the doorstep - he'd answered the door, because Alfred had been outside chopping wood - and asked carefully, "Is everything all right?"

"Alfred said you weren't going to be going out tonight," Clark said. He was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt that made him look like the farmer's son that he was, not the superhuman not-quite-a-god that he _also_ was, and it was fucking with Bruce's perceptions. It shouldn't have been; if anyone knew the value of a good disguise based around a piece of clothing that shaped people's perceptions of the wearer, it was Bruce. And yet.

"Alfred said I wasn't going to be going out tonight," he repeated, testing the words. When had Clark spoken to Alfred? More to the point, why hadn't Alfred told him that Clark had spoken to him?

Clark nodded, giving Bruce a bright smile. "And Lois is on an assignment in DC, so I thought you might like some company. Alfred said it was a good idea."

"Did he." Alfred was a traitor. Bruce bit back a sigh, stepping aside to let Clark in. "I hope you're not going to any trouble."

 _That_ piece of politeness was rewarded with Clark narrowing his eyes and saying, "Don't be Bruce Wayne at me. I've seen you both ways; I can tell the difference."

Well, wasn't that just _fine_? Clark wanted to get behind the mask, like it was supposed to be that easy. Bruce made another noncommittal grunting sound and closed the door behind Clark, leading the way into the study. That was a safe enough place to take a guest, wasn't it? It wasn't time for dinner yet, and he suspected he wouldn't have to tell Alfred that they'd have an extra person there for _that_.

Traitor.

In the study, he offered Clark a drink; he got the feeling it would take more than human alcohol to get a Kryptonian drunk, but he wasn't sure what else to _do_. Clark accepted the whiskey without protest, though, taking a sip and coughing and saying, "This is - nice."

"Nice." Bruce took a sip of his own drink, in case it had mutated sometime in the last few days, and raised his eyebrows. He'd cultivated a palate for alcohol as much for the necessity, given Bruce Wayne's heritage, as because he liked to know quality when he saw - or tasted - it. "This is a 25-year-old Chivas Regal."

"I'm sure it's very good." Clark sounded suspiciously meek. "It's just that with my senses, alcohol tends to all taste, well, _alcohol_."

Bruce sighed, taking the glass back, and said, "You should have said something. I'll get Alfred to bring you some sparkling juice."

If there was no point in Clark drinking his alcohol because he got no benefit either from the flavour or the intoxication, after all, Bruce wasn't going to insist on it. There was nobody here to impress.

Alfred appeared after a moment, gave Bruce one of those _looks_ that Bruce deciphered as meaning he'd better behave and accept that he was having a guest for the evening if he didn't want Alfred making acid remarks while he tried to get work done, and disappeared, returning a moment later with a fancy glass of sparkling juice for Clark, who seemed much more enthusiastic about that drink.

Bruce felt insulted on behalf of his whiskey, and waited until Alfred left to ask, "So did you have any plans for what we're supposed to do tonight?"

"I thought we could talk," Clark said, painfully earnest. Bruce wasn't sure _he'd_ ever been that open and honest, but if he had, it had been worn away a long time ago. He couldn't help a wince, covering it by tossing back the rest of Clark's abandoned whiskey.

"I hope you're not looking for grand revelations," he said, going over to one of the armchairs and gesturing for Clark to make himself comfortable. "You already know who I am and where I live. That's a pretty big concession for me."

"I know," Clark said, his tone conciliatory. "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to. But I was here for nearly a month, Bruce; I got to see you _without_ the mask you wear at events like the one Luthor threw. I guess I thought maybe you could use some company you don't _have_ to wear a mask with sometimes."

Bruce's smile couldn't help but be sardonic; if Clark thought that he was _ever_ off, he was fooling himself. But he could appreciate the sentiment behind the offer, even if the offer itself was misguided.

Perhaps realising that Bruce was hardly going to open up and start talking about his life, Clark opened the floor, going into a recitation of how Martha was coping with having been abducted - decently enough, apparently, with the help of the solitary counsellor who lived in Smallville (Bruce made a note to look up that counsellor and pay for the sessions); what Lois was up to right now - still investigating the full extent of Lex Luthor's involvement in the events leading up to the senatorial hearing that had gone so horribly wrong, and Clark kept his comments on that brief, his grief over the deaths obvious. Bruce appreciated that; he still felt that Wayne Enterprises, and he, had failed Wallace Keefe.

Clark was in the middle of talking about an article he was writing for the _Planet_ , some puff piece about a library dedication to Superman - "I'm not sure if it's a conflict of interest or not, and if it _is_ , I'm not sure how I can bring it up to Perry without sounding like I don't like Superman, which would be unprofessional, or like I like him _too much_ , which would also be unprofessional" - when Alfred came to call them to dinner.

Bruce managed to keep conversation over dinner limited to less complicated things, like the latest political thriller that he was certain Lois would have read and Clark would have, by extension, at least been aware of. _He_ hadn't read it - his extracurricular social life left very little time for reading - but he knew enough about it to make pertinent comments, and, since they weren't talking about anything that was liable to scrape against boundaries Bruce had set up long ago, it was an enjoyable enough way to spend an evening. He was almost sorry when Clark said good night and took off from one of the balconies, heading back to Metropolis.

"So," he said, not turning around. He knew Alfred was there. "He called, did he? Why wasn't I aware?"

"He didn't ask to speak with you." Alfred's voice held that edge of smugness that it always did when he was right about something. "He probably knew you'd have fobbed him off about tonight."

Well, Clark was right; Bruce would have made an excuse about why tonight wasn't a good time, even though he didn't have anything that the Bat needed to do. It grated, that he was right. Bruce grumbled, drinking the last of the whiskey he'd poured back before dinner, savouring the burn as he swallowed it, and then turned.

"Clear my social schedule tomorrow. I'm going out."

He hadn't had anything planned, but there was always something for the Bat to do. There would always be something for the Bat to do, here in the shadows.


	2. You stumbled in and bumped your head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark continues to act strangely in the wake of his near-death experience. Bruce tries to brush it off, and this ends up backfiring when Clark is waiting for Bruce in the cave after a night out as the Bat goes very wrong. Clark wants to take care of Bruce; he's just got some interesting definitions of what that means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early update to make up for the fact that the next update won't be for another two weeks or so, as I'm going into hospital for a procedure this week.
> 
> Content notes for this chapter: drugging, sexual assault, cauterisation without consultation, stalking. Bad!touch.

When Clark came over the next Thursday, Bruce was prepared. Alfred knew his calendar, and he _knew_ Alfred knew his calendar, so when Friday filled up with "question the second-tier drug runner about his boss", Bruce figured Clark would be showing up on one of the empty evenings, if he was going to show up.

And sure enough, the doorbell rang on Thursday, soon enough after most people's normal work day that Clark must have barely had time to get home, get changed, and come over, even taking his speed into account.

This time, Bruce was prepared for the conversation, and he was able to keep up with it in a way that didn't make Clark frown and accuse him of wearing a mask whilst also keeping a comfortable distance between himself and any _awkward_ conversation topics. He let Clark do most of the talking again, finding himself enjoying hearing about what Martha was up to - knitting _something_ that was going to be a surprise, although Bruce wasn't clear on who it was going to be a surprise for - and the work Lois was doing. It was almost like having a family, but comfortably distant, so that he didn't have to feel _too_ much about them. He could feel vicariously through Clark when it came to Martha and Lois. It was safer that way.

"Diana emailed me," Clark said at one point. "She's going to be out of contact for a while; something about looking into the underwater guy. Did you get that one?"

Bruce nodded; he'd received that email the day before, Diana warning that she wasn't going to have reliable communications for a few weeks and not to worry unless she hadn't been back in touch by the end of the next month. He hadn't been surprised; the footage he'd seen had implied that whoever the man underwater was, he was a _long_ way from civilisation. Diana could handle herself, though. She'd been around during World War I and seemed relatively unscathed by her lengthy life; she could handle a recon mission without Bruce's help.

He wasn't sure what Clark was looking for when he came here. Clark _said_ it was about friendship, and by the third visit Bruce was willing to provide some input of his own accord, mostly about what was going on at Wayne Enterprises. Talking about his job - the socially acceptable job, that is - like he would if his life had been a normal one. It felt strange. Alfred had never been _dis_ interested in what happened at Wayne Enterprises, but they usually had more important things to talk about. 

"You really care about them, don't you."

It wasn't a question, and Bruce looked up, frowning a little. "What?"

"Your employees at Wayne Enterprises," Clark said. "The way you talk about them, it's obvious. You really care about what happens to them."

Bruce shrugged. "They're my responsibility."

Something flickered in the back of Clark's eyes, an elusive sort of sadness. "How much of the world have you decided is your responsibility, Bruce?"

"Less than you've taken on," Bruce countered. "Gotham is mine, and the people who work for me. I don't think that's so unreasonable."

"Maybe not." Clark sipped his drink, watching Bruce over the rim of the glass with an unreadable expression in his eyes. "Be careful you don't take on a heavier burden than you can carry, Bruce."

"I know my limits." _That_ earned a quiet, polite snort, but it was true, more or less. "We're not all invulnerable. I haven't kept going this long by forgetting that."

"No. I don't suppose you have."

Clark's expression was still unreadable, and Bruce didn't like that. He was used to being able to read people, to being able to read _Clark_. The mystery sitting across from him at the table didn't feel like Clark. It wore his face, but for an instant, it felt _wrong_. And then Clark smiled, bright and open, and the moment was broken.

He couldn't shake the sense that there was something wrong, but there was nothing in Clark's behaviour for the rest of the evening to give him anything to back up that sense.

When it got late and Clark sighed and said he should get back to Metropolis, Bruce walked him to one of the upstairs balconies. There wasn't much point in insisting on using the front door when your guest could _fly_ , after all.

On the balcony, Clark turned suddenly, taking Bruce by surprise and stepping into the personal space that was more intimate than the entire lake house. Bruce unconsciously took a step back, his heel scraping against the wall behind him, as Clark got close enough that Bruce could feel the heat from his body. Clark lifted his hand to grip Bruce's shoulder, his hand light and careful, but the fact remained that Bruce didn't get touched by many people and was acutely aware that if Clark felt like it, he could break Bruce's collarbone just by tightening his grip. He wouldn't even break a sweat.

"Be careful with yourself," Clark said quietly, squeezing Bruce's shoulder. "I don't have so many friends that I want to lose any of them."

He was gone before Bruce could formulate a response. Later, when Bruce was undressing before bed, there were shadows on his shoulder that couldn't rightly be called bruises.

Clark was still getting used to having his full strength back, Bruce told himself. It wasn't something to get up in arms about. Bruce had done worse to himself working out. What was a bit of rougher handling between what he was starting to think might be friends?

 

It wasn't like Bruce was _checking up_ on Clark, he told himself. But he had feelers in plenty of markets, not just in Gotham but in the surrounding cities, and word got back to him when _Superman_ suddenly showed up as a property-owner in Metropolis.

It wasn't his business why Clark had decided to get an apartment - a _penthouse_ apartment - in Superman's name, but it stung a bit that he hadn't asked Bruce to help set it up, considering how _easy_ it would have been to keep things under wraps through Wayne Enterprises and its various subsidiaries. It was still bothering him when Clark came for his by-now regular visit, and he said abruptly, "I didn't know you wanted a place as Superman."

Clark was quiet for a moment, watching Bruce with a tilted head, and then shrugged and said, "I needed somewhere for people to send the mail. Anyway, I'm supposed to be more approachable these days, aren't I?"

"You could have talked to me," Bruce pointed out. "I could have helped set something up."

"Yes, I suppose you could have," Clark agreed. "But you don't need to take responsibility for everything, Bruce."

There wasn't much he could say to that without it turning into an argument that he wasn't in the mood for tonight. He took a sip of his drink, choking when Clark added, "Besides, I've got more time on my hands now that I've quit working at the _Planet_."

He hadn't been prepared for _that_ , and he'd inhaled alcohol. Too busy trying to breathe to ask Clark what the hell he'd been thinking, Bruce was suddenly aware that Clark had crossed the room to stand beside Bruce, one hand gripping his arm and the other rubbing his back firmly enough to force his lungs to work more evenly.

"You love being a reporter," Bruce protested eventually, still coughing. If there was one thing he'd worked out about Clark in the last month or so, it was that reporting was something he actually _wanted_ to do. Bruce would have gone crazy trying to make it work as a career - he was good at his own brand of lies, but making them up about everyone else would have got old _fast_ \- but Clark's pieces, when Bruce had taken the time to read them while Clark had been recuperating, all had the same stamp of earnest honesty that Clark did.

"Not the sort of reporter the _Planet_ wants me to be," Clark said, rubbing Bruce's back. "I don't want to write stupid little puff pieces that nobody's interested in reading."

Bruce could understand that, to a degree, but he wasn't sure that just up and quitting his job was something Clark wasn't going to end up regretting. He took a moment to catch his breath, then offered, "I'm sure Wayne Enterprises has a subsidiary media group that has an opening, if you-"

"No." Clark patted Bruce's shoulder with the hand that had been rubbing his back. He was still holding onto Bruce's upper arm, Bruce realised suddenly. "I appreciate it, Bruce, but I think I need to take some time to work out what I really want to be doing. It's okay, really. Don't worry so much about me."

"Don't do things that are worrying and I won't worry," Bruce said gruffly. He wasn't coughing anymore; Clark's presence so close to him, still holding his arm and resting a hand on his back, was unnecessary now, but Clark didn't seem to have any intention of moving. He'd gone back to rubbing Bruce's back, but lightly now, more of a caress, and _that_ made no sense.

"Bruce," Clark said, his voice quiet and firm, "It's not your job to look after me."

Enough of talking with someone behind him; Bruce didn't appreciate that at the best of times. He turned, only to be brought up short when Clark tightened his grip on Bruce's arm, bringing his other hand up to grip Bruce's other shoulder, holding him still.

Bruises and Bruce had been old friends for years, and he knew what sort of pressure raised them by now; he was going to have marks in the shape of Clark's fingers. Oddly, that thought didn't bother him as much as the question of why Clark was acting so strangely.

"Clark," he said sharply, only to be brought up short when Clark's hand on his shoulder moved to curl around his throat, Clark's thumb stroking lightly over the curve of Bruce's jaw. There was no threat in the movement, aside from the threat implicit in having someone's hand at his throat at all, but Bruce couldn't help remembering the last time _he'd_ had his hand around Clark's throat. He swallowed, the motion pressing his skin closer to Clark's palm, and waited.

 _Fear_ wasn't the right word for it. He knew Clark by now, well enough to not be _afraid_ of him; Clark wasn't the sort of person who indulged in violence for violence's sake. And even with the grip on his arm turning bruising-hard and the hand on his throat closing until Bruce could feel Clark's fingertips with every inhalation, there was no _violence_ in it. There was an odd sort of focused intimacy, the way you touched someone when you were still learning what they wanted. And _that_ was the strange part, the thing that had Bruce off-balance, because that wasn't something he'd ever expected from Clark, and because the points of pain from Clark's fingers on his arm and the tightness when he swallowed weren't something he was supposed to find _intriguing_.

Clark wasn't used to having friends who knew his secret, Bruce told himself. The only other people who _did_ know the truth about him were Martha and Lois, and the relationship that had been growing between Clark and Bruce was definitely _not_ a familial one; was it any wonder that someone so starved of simple affection might fall back on what was familiar in his _other_ relationship with someone who knew his true identity? And he'd been through terrible trauma in the last few months. Bruce, who had had thirty-odd years to try and fail to deal with his own trauma, could hardly blame Clark for having trouble coping.

That didn't mean he was exactly _thrilled_ with having Clark acting like this.

"Clark," he said again, his voice softer this time, both in tone and in volume. "You're not thinking clearly."

"It's not _your_ job," Clark said, too close to Bruce's ear for comfort, "To look after _me_."

Something in that inflection was concerning, but Bruce was struggling to put his finger on it, with all the other facts occupying his attention. Fact: Clark was acting out of character, which meant that he probably wasn't coping with his near-death experience. Fact: Bruce trusted Clark not to do anything that was going to cause _damage_ ; a few little bruises here and there were just more details on a tapestry that had plenty of marks already. Fact: turning Clark away now could break the tenuous trust they'd built between them, and Bruce didn't want Clark out in the world, struggling with how to cope with the reminder of his own potential mortality every time he saw the scar on his chest, without _anyone_ to talk to.

Because Clark wouldn't talk to Martha or Lois about it; he'd known that immediately. There were some things he wouldn't want to tell them, some things that he'd see as too _dark_ to tell them. Who better to share dark things with than a man who worked in the dark?

(Fact: Bruce was _not comfortable_ with how his body was insisting on reacting to this particular situation, but he could shrug it off as an adrenaline reaction. Everybody had those.)

"Clark," he said, soft and soothing. "Let go of me and we can talk. Imagine what Alfred would think if he walked in on this."

Clark's hands tightened, and for a moment Bruce couldn't quite breathe. Before panic had a chance to set in, though, Clark's grip relaxed, and he stroked Bruce's throat gently, almost apologetically, murmuring, "Yes. Imagine what Alfred would think."

Another stroke, his thumb dancing over the pulse point, and Clark released Bruce, stepping back. Bruce turned to face him, resisting the urge to lift a hand to rub his throat; he could already tell he was going to need to pick his wardrobe carefully for the next few days, if he didn't want Alfred asking questions. Or he could always go out later, after Clark had gone home, and get into a fight that would neatly explain away the bruises.

Clark's expression was ludicrously uncertain, like he was afraid he was going to get kicked out. Bruce retrieved the glass of whiskey he'd put down when Clark had startled him with his quitting announcement, taking a sip and wincing at the burn as he swallowed. There was definitely more than just surface damage there, but he dismissed it as _not the important thing right now_. The important thing right now was helping Clark through whatever it was that was going on with him.

"Come with me," he said, finishing the drink and setting the glass down. He didn't wait for Clark to respond; he just led the way into the kitchen, where most of the time, he and Alfred prepared their own meals to their own schedule. Alfred kept up the pretence of being Bruce's butler more than his head of security when Clark visited, but Bruce wasn't the sort of person who was comfortable with the only other person he lived with serving him meals on a regular basis. Maybe it would have been different if he'd grown up with his parents teaching him how to be a Wayne the way they were, but that future had died with them, and there was no getting it back.

"Sit," he said, gesturing to one of the seats at the island counter. "I don't know what Alfred's doing, but he's not in tonight, so you'll have to put up with my cooking."

Something odd had flickered through Clark's eyes when Bruce said Alfred wasn't there, but it vanished at the mention of Bruce cooking, to be replaced with a light, not _quite_ incredulous smile that made Bruce think of cornfields and wide blue skies. Clark could be disarmingly small-town farm boy when he wanted to be.

"You know how to cook?"

"I know how to cook," Bruce said, fighting and failing to keep the amusement from colouring his tone. Anyone who found out was always so _surprised_. He didn't have many amusements these days; surprising people with unexpected skills was one of the few that he could indulge in regardless of whose face he wore.

Clark settled on one of the chairs, watching Bruce move around the kitchen and collect a pan, knives, a chopping board. After a moment, he asked, "Should I ask what you're planning to make, or is it a surprise?"

Bruce chuckled. This was easier, a return to the slightly tentative camaraderie that they'd found themselves in. He could forgive Clark the occasional slip when they returned to this.

"Wait and see."

An ominous pronouncement from anyone else, but when Bruce decided to pick up a skill, he didn't just dabble. He wasn't a five-star chef by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew how to work with spices and what to do with different cuts of meat. He didn't know much about Clark's metabolism or any non-standard dietary needs - the ship's databank was proving frustratingly difficult to crack - but Clark had always seemed perfectly happy with the food Alfred had provided; Bruce stuck to that baseline and extrapolated from there.

They chatted while he cooked, about inconsequential things, both of them aware that bringing up the apartment and Clark's resignation would return them to the standoff sooner than either of them were ready to deal with it - certainly sooner than Bruce was willing to deal with how _he'd_ reacted to it. Clark ate the steak and baked potato and salad that Bruce put in front of him and said, "This is _almost_ as good as what Mom makes," and Bruce couldn't help but smile, even when swallowing made his throat ache.

He didn't raise the subject again. Now that Clark was relaxed, talking about how Martha was starting up some sort of association back in Smallville - Bruce wasn't clear on the details, but it was something about farmers' widows who still wanted to run the farms - Bruce didn't want to ruin the mood by asking what the hell that little _moment_ back in the den had been about. Clark shouldn't be touching anyone but Lois with that sort of intensely focused intimacy. He sure as hell shouldn't be touching _Bruce_ like that. But bringing it up now would break the peace that had settled over them while he cooked, so he let it lie. Maybe all Clark needed was time.

He left the lake house less than ten minutes after Clark did, donning the suit and heading into Gotham. Alfred wasn't stupid; he'd pick up on these bruises, even if he hadn't noticed the marks that Bruce hadn't done the dignity of calling _bruises_. Getting into a fight with the drug runners who were trying to get Viper back onto the streets of Gotham would be all the excuse Bruce needed for why his throat and arm were marked up.

 

Two weeks passed, and neither of them mentioned it. Clark still came by once a week, almost like clockwork - avoiding the nights Bruce had planned to go intercept _problems_ , so he was clearly still in communication with Alfred, and Bruce might be irritated by that if he didn't find it so amusing and oddly touching - but he kept Bruce at arm's length, breaking what seemed like his own rule only to briefly clasp Bruce's shoulder at the end of each night in farewell. It wasn't awkward, but Bruce, his sense of body language honed by years of figuring out who was what player in the psychodrama playing out in Gotham's shadows, could pick up on the sense of coiled movement waiting for its moment in every move Clark _didn't_ make.

There was still something wrong; he just couldn't put his finger on exactly what, and the databank was being impossibly dense. He'd managed to find a search function, of sorts, but what was there to _look_ for? What parameters would he use? Clark was acting a little strangely after suffering an intense trauma; Bruce didn't need an alien database to know what PTSD was.

Tonight, Bruce had more on his mind than the vagaries of his Kryptonian friend; he'd tracked the suppliers of Viper to _their_ supplier, and the subsequent fight had gone a little messier than he liked them to. It had _ended_ with the thugs bound and branded, waiting for Gotham's system to work its crippled version of justice when the police answered the anonymous phone call that he'd had Alfred make, tipping them off to the thugs' presence on the waterfront, but it had also ended with Bruce gritting his teeth behind his mask as he forced himself not to limp away. Showing weakness wasn't a tool in the Bat's arsenal.

He catalogued the damage as he set the car on autopilot back to the Cave. The knee that had been weak for years now from repeated dislocations was perilously close to being out of joint again, and he hadn't done it any favours by walking on it. More bruises than he cared to count peppered his torso and upper arms, blending into generalised pain that he could almost dismiss. A knife had landed a lucky hit, sliding up and under his chestplate to bite deep enough in his side to be annoying without being _dangerous_ , if he got it dealt with soon enough. Another knife had landed a less lucky hit, because the armour on his legs wasn't as good, protection traded for flexibility, and the blade had broken off in his thigh, but that wasn't such a problem; it kept the wound from bleeding too much, and the strike had missed anything important. It'd hurt for a while and Alfred would make biting remarks at him while stitching it up, but it wasn't a crippling injury.

He was distracted as the car pulled into the cave; that was unlike him, and should have told him that he was in worse shape than he'd thought. It took longer than it should have to realise that the figure standing by the car's platform, waiting for him, was too tall and broad to be Alfred.

He blinked at Clark as he levered himself out of the car, biting back a wince when both legs protested the movement, and growled, "What are you doing here?"

Not that Clark wasn't welcome, but the Bat growled everything. It was how his voice _worked_.

Clark didn't answer him, not directly. He moved to get his shoulder under Bruce's arm and helped him over to the bench that Alfred had installed near the car (Alfred had remarked that _he_ was getting too old to be dragging Bruce further than that when he got himself too beat up to carry himself into the house proper), saying quietly, "Tell me what needs to be seen to first."

Bruce let out a mirthless laugh, dragging off his cowl and tossing it aside. "Can't you tell? X-ray vision, right?"

Clark's answering smile was just as mirthless, and he said, "Your suit interferes with my vision. Lead fibres, right?"

Right. He'd installed those to hide old scars that might give away weaknesses back when he didn't trust Clark, and he hadn't got around to replacing the suit. Letting out a huff of a sigh, he started to work the suit off, biting back the curses that wanted to break free when every movement pulled at _something_ that hurt.

"Right knee, left thigh, left side above the ribs," he reported, eventually getting the chestplate and backpiece off and letting them fall beside the bench. "The right knee's not too bad; it'll just need wrapping. I've got half a knife in the left thigh, though, and I'm not sure about the cut. It might need stitching. Where's Alfred?"

"Let's get these off," Clark said, moving to carefully help Bruce remove the bottom half of the suit. Between his bad knee and the knife-blade still stuck in his thigh, it wasn't exactly a painless procedure, and Bruce was sweating by the time it was done, any thought of where Alfred was chased out of his mind by the throbbing in his knee and the sharper pain in his thigh.

"So," Bruce said, ignoring the way his body was screaming that passing out would be really nice right now. His body didn't get what it wanted any other time; why should now be any different? "You showed up pretty conveniently."

Clark gave him a _Look_ from where he was putting the suit to one side and fetching the ludicrously well-stocked first aid kit that they kept next to the car for anything that needed patching up before Bruce went up to the medical suite for longer-term treatment. Bruce met it with a _Look_ of his own. Clark didn't get to just show up in Bruce's cave and _not_ explain himself.

"Bruce." Clark sighed, crouching beside the bench and taking a pair of paramedic scissors from the kit, widening the ragged cut left by the knife in the pants Bruce wore beneath the suit to pad it. Bruce, who refused to _not_ sit upright on the bench even when his head was spinning from pain and the beginnings of blood loss, could see the damage more clearly now; the last half-inch of the knife stuck out, broken off raggedly, and his skin was smeared with blood, but not as much as it would have been if the knife hadn't been sealing the wound.

Still, it had to come out sooner or later, and Clark seemed to want to get his hands dirty, so Bruce clenched his teeth and growled, "Do it."

Clark splayed one hand over Bruce's thigh to keep his leg still and took hold of the half-inch of rough metal with the other hand, giving it one sharp tug to pull it free. Bruce bit down hard on the inside of his cheek as he felt metal grate against bone inside his leg as the knife moved, the tang of blood filling the air as the wound, no longer kept closed by the intruding metal, began to bleed freely.

"Hold still," Clark said, tossing the knife-blade aside and resting his other hand on Bruce's shoulder, holding him still. For a moment, Bruce wasn't sure what Clark intended, and then Clark's eyes began to glow with heat, and it became incredibly clear.

He wasn't given time to protest. He wasn't sure he _would_ have protested if Clark had brought it up as a possibility instead of just _doing it_ \- cauterisation had its benefits over sutures, especially where the potential for ripping stitches out came in - but there was barely a second between Clark's eyes _beginning_ to glow and the smell of burning meat filling the cave.

For a moment, the pain didn't register. And then the blinding, burning agony became the centre of the world, and he barely felt Clark's hands holding him down.

It lasted a few seconds, if that, and Bruce refused to scream, biting his cheek bloody instead. His head was spinning too much to fight back when Clark guided him to lie on his back on the bench, absurdly gentle, and then there was something blessedly cool on his leg and the scissors were at work again, cutting through his shirt to bare the gash along his ribs.

"If you even _think_ about lighting up, I'll drop you in Gotham Bay," Bruce gasped.

Clark chuckled, his fingers moving over Bruce's ribs as he inspected the cut, and said, "I can't cauterise this; it's too close to vital organs. We'll have to do it the old-fashioned way."

" _Sutures_ are not more _old-fashioned_ than cauterisation."

It was an absurd argument to be having, but Bruce was too off-balance to come up with anything better, and when Clark leaned over him, one arm lightly restraining over his collarbones as he began to stitch the long gash closed, Bruce almost forgot how to breathe, and for a moment his throat seemed to burn with remembered bruises.

It was an adrenaline reaction, he told himself firmly, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. He couldn't see anything except Clark's restraining arm from this vantage point, and looking at _that_ was having entirely the wrong effect on entirely the wrong parts of his anatomy.

"You never did answer me," he pointed out, as Clark set the fourth suture. "You showed up pretty damn conveniently. Are you checking up on me?"

"Do you need checking up on?" Clark countered, pausing in his suturing and reaching for an alcohol wipe to clean some blood away from Bruce's skin. "It feels like you do, from where I'm standing. I thought I told you to call me if you needed backup."

Bruce grunted, testing the arm keeping him pinned. Clark pressed him down again, resuming his suturing, and Bruce said, "I couldn't exactly call for backup in the middle of a fight. We don't live in a Star Trek movie with communicators."

"Bruce." Now Clark's voice sounded condescendingly amused. "Do you think I wouldn't have heard you, no matter _how_ you called?"

 _That_ wasn't something Bruce had considered. He didn't bother trying to look at Clark; fighting the arm keeping him lying flat was not only futile, it was embarrassing. His tone sharpened, though, as he said, "Are you _keeping tabs_ on me?"

"It's a good thing I am," Clark said, setting the last suture and putting aside the thread. "Alfred's halfway across town. You'd have been on your own."

"It wouldn't be the first time I've given myself stitches." All right, help was always better than doing it alone, but the idea of Clark keeping an eye on him rankled. That was exactly the sort of thing he'd been concerned about back when he'd thought Clark was a danger. He lifted his hands to push at Clark's arm across his collarbones, saying impatiently, "Let me up, Clark. I can fix a bandage myself."

"You took care of me," Clark said, immovable. "Let me take care of you."

Bruce sighed. Reciprocation was a bitch, but Clark was the sort of person who insisted on it. Was that what this was about, some sort of idea about gratitude?

"Fine," he said, making himself relax. If it would make Clark feel better, he could let the Kryptonian help.

Clark fussed over getting a bandage properly situated over the stitches, where it would protect them if Bruce wanted to take a shower - and Bruce very much wanted to take a shower sometime in the near future - and then let Bruce sit up, moving to examine the knee that wasn't _quite_ dislocated. Compared to the cauterisation and the stitches, Clark's fingers easing the patella back into its proper position and strapping it there barely registered as pain, but something must have shown on Bruce's face, because Clark disappeared for a few minutes, returning with a couple of pills and a glass of water.

A glass of water that he proceeded to hold to Bruce's lips, as though it had been Bruce's hands and not his legs that had been injured. Bruce bit back a sigh and took the pills and the water. Clark was taking this "take care of you" thing a bit too far.

"Let me help you up to your room," Clark said, watching Bruce like a hawk. "You'll be unsteady on that knee for a couple days."

As much as Bruce hated to show weakness, Clark had a point. He nodded tiredly and got to his feet, hissing through gritted teeth as his legs and side made their disapproval of the notion of moving known. Sleeping in the cave had never been a good idea, though, and the rest of his medication was upstairs; it'd be fine once he got up there. He could take a couple of days off to recuperate and get back on the streets once he could walk again without dosing himself too badly.

Clark's shoulder under his arm was reassuringly steady, and there were no unfortunate collisions with the wall between the cave and Bruce's bedroom, something that couldn't always be said when Bruce came home from a night out as the Bat as injured as this. Clark guided him over to the bed and set him down carefully, and then, after a moment's pause, said, "You should get out of those clothes. You're going to feel terrible if you wake up in blood-caked things."

Bruce blinked down at himself, feeling suddenly off-balance. He hadn't thought of that, and that was unlike him. Clark hadn't been idly suggesting, though; he moved to sit on the edge of the bed, reaching to carefully but firmly tug the shirt off over Bruce's head, careful to avoid catching the bandage over the stitches. When he reached for Bruce's waistband, however, Bruce grabbed his wrists, shifting away. He might have started to trust Clark, but there was a _long_ step between trusting someone enough to have them over for dinner and trusting them enough to be naked in front of them. Plenty of people slept with Bruce Wayne, but that was different to Clark undressing Bruce.

"Bruce," Clark said quietly, his voice coaxing. "You said you'd let me take care of you. You need to get out of these bloodstained things and cleaned up so you can sleep. Let me help."

He wasn't pulling away from Bruce's hands around his wrists, and he could have broken Bruce's grip easily. That, and the wisps of confusion that were starting to drift into Bruce's consciousness, was what broke Bruce's resolve. He released Clark's wrists, giving a tired nod.

Time went a little strange, then, and that was _definitely_ not something that Bruce usually experienced with his painkillers. He didn't take enough to be compromised, just enough to be functional. Maybe Clark had erred on the side of caution when it came to pain relief and had given him too much - well, Bruce's idea of too much, which was still shy of an overdose. Whatever the reason, he'd missed the steps between agreeing with whatever it was Clark had been asking and realising that he was naked on the bed with Clark sitting beside him, running a warm, damp cloth over his skin to wash away the drying blood.

 _Nobody_ saw him in this level of vulnerability. Not even Alfred, not in a long time. And there was something _wrong_ , because Bruce could normally keep his emotions from showing on his face - he had to be able to, in order to operate as the Bat for as long as he had been with nobody suspecting Bruce Wayne - but now he could _tell_ that he was telegraphing, and that wasn't okay. Not even Clark got that.

"Shh," Clark said quietly, when Bruce made a low noise in the back of his throat that wasn't a whine only by virtue of not being properly vocalised. Clark leaned down to press a soft kiss to Bruce's shoulder, and that was wrong too, the increasingly-smaller coherent part of Bruce's mind pointed out. He set the cloth aside, stretching out beside Bruce, and brought his hand up to curl lightly around Bruce's throat, just resting there without constricting, saying, "It's all right. You'll sleep soon."

Something was wrong. Something was wrong _with Clark_ , but Bruce couldn't concentrate on it, couldn't concentrate on _anything_. The moment he fixed on a coherent thought, confusion chased it away. It felt like being drunk. For someone who held onto control as tightly as Bruce did, it was _terrifying_.

"Shh," Clark said again, lifting his free hand to brush gently at Bruce's cheeks. "Don't cry. I know what you like."

Clark shifted, pinning Bruce's legs down with one of his own slung over his thighs, and tightened his hand at Bruce's throat until Bruce could feel his heartbeat against Clark's fingers, fast and erratic, beating like a butterfly trying to escape a trap. Clark wasn't holding tight enough to make breathing difficult, or to raise bruises, but Bruce's body was reacting the same way it had before, arousal making itself known, although slowly.

" _Clark_." His voice was slurring, and that was a sign that there was something wrong, more than anything else. He didn't slur unless he was exhausted or drunk, and he didn't think he was either of those things right now. Moving proved difficult; coordinating his limbs enough to lift a hand and push weakly at Clark's hand seemed to be the limit of his ability, and that was frightening in itself.

"You need someone to take care of you," Clark said, his voice gentle and reasonable as he pressed another kiss to Bruce's shoulder, ignoring Bruce's attempts to dislodge his hand around Bruce's throat. "And I'm tired of giving up what I want because it _looks bad_ to want things. We both want things that other people wouldn't understand, Bruce. I can help with yours. Just relax and let me." He leaned up to kiss Bruce's collarbone, right below where his hand rested, and murmured, "I know what you want. You don't even have to ask me."

Confusion and fear and the arousal that made itself unwelcome whenever Clark made a move for Bruce's throat made for a heady mixture, and Bruce didn't have the capacity to fight it, not compromised the way he was, however it had happened. Clark had him pinned at the thighs and the neck, and whatever it was making him feel off-balance and unsteady made it impossible to gather his thoughts enough to even _consider_ fighting. Clark seemed to take his silence for assent; he smiled, kissing Bruce's shoulder again, and reached down with his free hand to start stroking Bruce's cock.

Bruce Wayne had been a playboy, and still went home with more than enough people for the tabloids to gossip about, but he never had sex compromised. It wasn't good security practice, and for all Alfred had plenty to make cutting remarks about, his security wasn't one of them. This strange, floaty feeling was entirely new, and it wasn't a comfortable sensation. His body responded to the stimulation, and some part of his psyche apparently responded to having Clark's hand at his throat like Clark wanted to gently pull out his jugular, but it didn't feel like sex. There was a helplessness that made him sick to his stomach, wondering vaguely, amidst the confusion, whether Clark would still be as interested in jerking him off if he threw up all over him right in the middle of it.

That possibility never came to be, although the nausea didn't abate. Clark kept pressing soft, absurdly gentle kisses to Bruce's shoulder as he stroked him, keeping him pinned down firmly enough that Bruce could feel bruises beginning to form beneath Clark's fingers on his throat, a fact that only seemed to feed his arousal. He twisted his fingers in the sheets, biting back the sounds that wanted to escape. A part of him recognised that Clark seemed to think this was helping; another part of him refused to give Clark the satisfaction of making him make _noise_.

He couldn't have said how long it was before he came, biting his tongue until it bled to keep himself from crying out. Clark seemed pleased, cleaning him up with the washcloth and leaning up to kiss him gently.

"You should rest," Clark said quietly, stroking Bruce's hair. "I'll wait until you're sleeping before I go."

"Clark." Concentrating on words was hard. Why was it _so hard_? He forced himself to think, dragging coherency together out of shreds of focus. "We need... we need to talk about..."

"About this?" Clark smiled beatifically, kissing him again. "I don't think so, Bruce. You need to rest. Besides." He settled comfortably, pulling a sheet up over Bruce and tracing his fingertips over the places on Bruce's throat that were already starting to ache with the promise of bruises. "This was a trial run. You're not going to remember it in the morning."


	3. I left my body lying somewhere in the sands of time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After waking up with a suspicious blank in his memory, Bruce tries to put together what happened the night before. Clark makes his move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the well wishes, guys! Everything went well.
> 
> Content notes for this chapter: more drugging! Some oblique discussion of rape.

Bruce woke with a strange sense of timelessness. He usually had a decent body clock, able to tell roughly how long he'd been asleep by what time it felt like, but everything felt skewed right now. His head was pounding, a dull counterpoint to the sharper ache in his leg and side, and he vaguely recalled the fight the night before - only the night before? - but try as he might, he couldn't pierce the haze surrounding how he'd got back to the lake house and treated the injuries.

The room smelled antiseptic, which said he was either in a hospital or in the medical suite; the latter, hopefully, because explaining to doctors why Bruce Wayne had a knife-wound in his leg and side.

"Master Bruce?"

Alfred's voice was concerned enough that Bruce couldn't ignore it in favour of letting his headache subside a bit more; grimacing at the light seemed to pierce his skull, he opened his eyes and sat up, relieved to see the familiar walls of the medical suite. Thank God for Alfred's sense of security being almost as paranoid as Bruce's.

"Alfred." His voice sounded rusty, and his mouth was dry. He ignored both. "What happened?"

"I was hoping you could tell me."

Alfred looked like he hadn't had much sleep the night before, and from the light slanting in from the windows, it was well into the day, possibly even afternoon. That didn't track. Bruce had trouble sleeping at the best of times; he couldn't remember the last time he'd slept in as late as it felt.

"I was called out last night, after you asked me to call the tip in to the police," Alfred said, his voice tight and too controlled. "When I got back, you were in your bedroom, and I assumed you'd come home, patched yourself up, and gone to sleep. When you hadn't woken up eight hours later, I thought something might be wrong, so I took the liberty of moving you here and taking some blood."

Bruce nodded slowly, lifting a hand to explore his skull carefully. There was no soreness that could explain the missing time, no head injury. No concussion or convenient trauma to explain why he'd slept for so long.

"You did the right thing," he said. "What are you testing for?"

"The standard sedatives," Alfred replied. "Thorazine, Haldol, and atropine, and any biological agent that doesn't belong in your blood. It would help if you could tell me what you remember."

"Not much," Bruce admitted. He hesitated, and then said, "Add Rohypnol to that list."

Alfred's expression sharpened, and he said slowly, "You think you were slipped something."

"I can't see how I can have been, but I don't remember getting back here, which is why I suggested testing for it," Bruce said, sighing. "How long was I out?"

"Nearly twelve hours. I was starting to think I should call Master Dick."

Bruce looked up, alarmed. "No, don't bother Dick while he's working. I'm sure we'll figure it out."

He wasn't, but he didn't want to drag Dick back to Gotham without need. Their relationship wasn't a _bad_ one, but it was a complicated one, and Bruce was self-aware enough to admit that he was a big part of the reason Dick had run as far as Bludhaven to go to the police academy, rather than stay in Gotham. He trusted Dick to come if Bruce needed him, but at the same time, he didn't want to ask too often, just in case.

Alfred looked unimpressed, but he didn't remark on Dick again; he picked up a small plastic cup from near the bank of monitors and said, "The fastest test for Rohypnol is a urinalysis."

Bruce didn't have to ask how Alfred knew that; _he_ knew that, because when they lived the way they did, it was just good practice to know the best ways to test for all sorts of drugs. He took the cup and went into the medical suite's bathroom, where he received another shock: underneath the bandage on his thigh, instead of a stitched cut like the one on his side, there was a neat line of burned flesh.

_Someone_ had decided to take a cauterising iron to his thigh, and he couldn't remember who. That was almost as unsettling as Doomsday had been. He returned to the medical suite, handing over the now-filled cup to Alfred, and sat down on the bed, inspecting the rest of his wounds.

The stitches closing the gash in his side weren't his, and his knee wasn't wrapped the way he usually did it. There was nothing unusual about the bruises - it was a rare night that Bruce came home without bruises somewhere - but the knee wrapping, the burn, and the stitches bothered him. He started unrolling the bandage around his knee, needing to check it for himself, suddenly aware that _anything_ could have happened during that gap in his memory.

Alfred let him work without interruption, and the medical suite was quiet while Bruce checked his knee - black and blue with bruising, and swollen from the near-dislocation, but pretty much how he'd expected it to look - and re-wrapped it, ignoring the way his hands shook. Next up: the stitches. They'd been done well, neat and evenly-spaced and not so far apart that the cut would scar too badly, but they were still _not Bruce's handiwork_.

The burn was the most perplexing part. That _was_ going to scar, although he could tell it would be a neat, even scar rather than a ragged scar like some of the burns he'd seen, but he couldn't quite figure out why someone would have felt the need to stitch one injury but cauterise the other. Stitches would have done just as well on the leg wound, and would have left less of a mark later.

Unless that was the point.

"Bruce."

Alfred's voice jolted him out of his thoughts, and he hastily recovered the leg wound, making a note to refresh his memory on the proper treatment for burns, looking over to Alfred. Then it hit that Alfred hadn't said _Master Bruce_ ; he'd just used Bruce's first name. It wasn't a lack of familiarity that dictated how Alfred addressed him, it was habit and tradition, and breaking from it was concerning.

"It's Rohypnol, isn't it?" he asked, seeing the look in Alfred's eyes. He didn't need an answer; he sighed, closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "You know why we can't have cameras in here. I can't take the risk that someone will get their hands on footage of the Bat in Bruce Wayne's house."

"That's all well and good, but it _does_ mean we have no evidence of who was here last night," Alfred said, his tone one of tight control. He hesitated before speaking again. "Do you think-"

Bruce shook his head sharply, cutting Alfred off before he could finish that thought, saying gruffly, "I haven't had sex. Not the sort that it'd have to be when I was given roofies, anyway."

The relief in Alfred's expression was painful. Bruce forgot, sometimes, that Alfred had known him since he'd been a child.

"Let me know when the blood tests come back," he said abruptly. "There might be something else there, and it's better that we know. I'm going down to the cave to see if I can work out anything there."

"Master Bruce-"

"I'll be careful," he said quietly. It wasn't something he said very often to Alfred, because he tried not to make promises he couldn't keep to the people he cared about, but he didn't want to see that pinched look in Alfred's eyes any longer. "And if I start feeling off, I'll come back upstairs and rest. All right?"

Alfred sighed. "All right. Let me know if you need anything."

He needed a shower, suddenly and viscerally, but that was pushed to the back of his mind as he made his way downstairs and began a thorough search of the cave.

There was nothing out of place, other than the first-aid kit by the bench near the car's parking platform. Bruce's blood was in little trails from the car to the bench, flaking evidence of how badly injured he'd been the night before - no wonder he'd been out for so long, he thought, trying to be dispassionate about it. Add blood loss to the effects of the Rohypnol and it was a miracle he hadn't lost an entire day.

Searching the cave for clues took an alarming toll, and he was shaking by the time he had to admit that he'd come up empty. He nudged the first-aid kit with his foot, making a note to have it checked for prints, although he didn't expect that to give him anything useful, and started toward the bench, intending to sit down for a few minutes to get his bearings again.

His stomach turned and his throat ached as he approached it, and he stopped. He raised a hand to play lightly over his own throat, feeling the points of pain there, and a band of lower, duller ache over his collarbones, like he'd been trapped under a fallen beam and had had to fight his way free.

That hadn't happened last night, as far as he could remember. But _something_ had happened on that bench that his body remembered, even if his mind didn't.

Bruce swallowed heavily, leaving the cave and going up to his bedroom to take a proper shower. In the unforgiving light of the bathroom, the bruises were stark and blatant, and he frowned as he stood in front of the mirror, lightly tracing them with his fingertips. The ones on his torso and arms were long and rounded, formed by blows from the batons the thugs had been using; he remembered _that_. The shadow over his upper chest, though - he couldn't remember anything that explained that. And he couldn't remember anything that explained the fingerprints on his throat.

"Clark," he whispered, feeling sick. Clark, who had been unaccountably tactile since his recovery from Doomsday. Clark, who only two weeks ago had left bruises just like this one from a confrontation in the den that Bruce still couldn't explain.

Clark, who had heat vision. Hadn't Bruce's nightmares featured him burning people alive, not that long ago?

Cauterising the leg wound could be explained away as trying to help; so could stitching the side wound and wrapping his knee. With the exception of the cauterisation, those were things Bruce had had Alfred do for him dozens of times before, when he hadn't been able to reach a particular injury or he'd been too exhausted to tend to them himself. But the blank space in his memories and the test results couldn't be explained away by anything benign.

Drying himself off and getting dressed, he went to his office and put out feelers for more of the green rock that Lex had got his hands on. If there was something wrong with Clark - less and less of an _if_ , now - then Bruce would need a way to subdue him until he could figure out how to fix it.

 

He and Alfred didn't talk about it again. He knew Alfred was unhappy about that, but he couldn't see a way around it. Telling Alfred his suspicions before they were confirmed would only put Alfred in danger, and given the look he'd seen on Alfred's face when the test had come back positive, he wasn't at all sure Alfred wouldn't do something stupid if he knew who Bruce suspected was responsible.

He did call Martha and ask if she'd heard from Clark recently. She seemed pleased to hear from him, something he was still getting used to.

"Clark? Yes, he's been visiting more often lately," she told Bruce. "He won't say, but I think that business last month really shook him. How are you holding up?"

"Me? I'm fine." Bruce wasn't about to tell _Clark's mother_ that he thought Clark had slipped him a roofie, after all. "I'm just concerned about how he's handling being hurt that badly. From what I understand, it would have been a new experience for him. Not exactly a _fun_ new experience."

"He says you've been helping him," Martha said, warmth suffusing her tone. "Clark's never made friends easily. Not out of preference; he's just always had this secret hanging over his head. I think it's easier for him to feel comfortable with you because he knows you know and you're not going to do anything with it."

Bruce made a noncommittal noise, frowning. So Clark hadn't done anything to or around Martha; that was good. It meant that whatever was going on, he wasn't going to be a threat to _her_. He shook himself out of thought in time to hear Martha saying, "So if you don't have other plans for Thanksgiving, you and Alfred are more than welcome in Smallville."

If he'd been drinking, he'd have choked. As it was, he had to swallow heavily a few times before he could reply.

"That'd be nice, Martha," he said quietly. Thanksgiving was still a while away. He had time to figure out what was wrong with Clark and get him better and home in time for the holiday.

Lois was next on his list of people to call. This time of day, on a weekday, he figured the best way to get in touch with her was to call the _Planet_. He put on his best "Bruce Wayne returning an inconvenient call" voice when the receptionist answered and asked for "the girl with the street name, Avenue or something", which got him a little chuckle and put through to Lois's line.

"Lois Avenue?" she asked, her voice amused, but Bruce could hear tension underlying her tone. "What's up, Bruce?"

"Sorry to call you at work," he said, frowning again. That tension in her voice wasn't normal, from what he knew of Lois. She was a workaholic, but she wasn't naturally _tense_. "I was wondering if you'd noticed anything... different... about Clark's behaviour lately."

There was a tight intake of breath, and Bruce heard naked pain in her voice when she replied, "Clark and I aren't talking that much right now."

"What happened?"

"We had a fight about him leaving the _Planet_ ," Lois said, obviously fighting to get her voice under control. "I get that he's struggling, that being hurt that badly must have been awful for him, but that doesn't mean he should throw his career away."

"What happened?" Bruce repeated. "Are you all right?"

Lois sighed. "I'm bruised, but it's nothing that won't get better," she said slowly. "He'll feel bad about it when he comes to his senses and he'll apologise. You know Clark; he's a nice guy. He didn't mean it."

Bruce's temper flared. "Bruised?"

"Heartsore." Lois sighed again. "He said that he doesn't have room in his life for a woman he has to keep saving."

That sounded bad, but not as bad as _bruised_ had sounded. Bruce pinched the bridge of his nose, saying, "It sounds like a bad fight."

"Some shouting might have been involved," Lois admitted. "Look, Bruce, I appreciate your concern, but I'm all right. Clark needs some time, and I can give him that."

"Call me if you need anything," Bruce said quietly, letting Lois hang up. He hadn't expected _this_ development. Still, at least if Clark and Lois weren't spending much time together, Lois couldn't be in too much danger. Bruce had chosen this life, and he still considered himself at least partially responsible for how Clark had been injured; as long as he could direct Clark's personality change towards himself, rather than towards Martha and Lois, he could live with the fallout while he tried to work out what was wrong and how to fix it.

 

When the green rock began to trickle in, he had to admit to Alfred what was going on. Alfred wasn't stupid; he'd make the connections himself, sooner or later, and it'd be better coming from Bruce. The night the first delivery of green rock came in, a paltry dime-sized piece of dirty emerald-coloured stone that had cost almost as much as a new car, Bruce went to Alfred's security office to talk to him.

"I think something's wrong with Clark," he said, watching Alfred closely. Alfred's eyes narrowed, but he remained silent, letting Bruce speak. "He's been changing since he got hurt. I don't know whether it's a response to trauma or something else, but I thought that taking some precautions might be a good idea."

"You think he might be the one who drugged you," Alfred said more than he asked, a dangerous look in his eyes.

"I think he thought he was helping," Bruce said. He didn't remember _that_ night, but he remembered other conversations he'd had with Clark. "I'd promised him I'd call him if I needed help, and you'd been called away, so..."

"He drugged you to help you," Alfred said, his tone sceptical.

Bruce shrugged. "Maybe he thought I needed the sleep. He treated my injuries, though, and he got me up to my bedroom, so I don't think he intended any harm."

"You don't think he intended any harm when he gave you Rohypnol." Alfred's voice was sharp. "Would you be saying that if it was anybody but you?"

"It _was_ me." And that was the material point, wasn't it? Bruce could handle treatment that he wouldn't tolerate being given to anyone else. "And putting the drugs aside, he _did_ help. He got me patched up, cleaned up and sleeping. So maybe he went to extremes when it came to the _sleeping_ part."

"If he'd wanted you sleeping, he could have given you any of a dozen sedatives," Alfred snapped. "Nobody buys Rohypnol without knowing it's a date rape drug."

"I don't entirely disagree," Bruce admitted. "I'm not just brushing this under the rug, Alfred. But I honestly don't think he was trying to hurt me. I think it was some sort of misguided attempt at helping."

"Obviously, you're not convinced it'll stay that way," Alfred said, eyeing the piece of green rock that Bruce had set on the desk. "I assume that's where money has been being siphoned to?"

"This and some other deliveries," Bruce said, nodding. "The others aren't going to be in for a week yet at least, but I want to get started on this piece. I want to make it into a pendant for Diana when she gets back."

"All right." Alfred sighed. "I assume I'm not supposed to talk to him about this."

"No, you're not," Bruce said firmly. "I'll deal with it, Alfred."

 

Clark came by for dinner again that week. Alfred managed to behave normally, something Bruce was thankful for, but Bruce was acutely aware that Alfred was torn between not leaving Bruce alone with Clark and not wanting to be in the same room as Clark in case he said or did something he couldn't take back. Eventually, after bringing in a bottle of sparkling grape juice and giving Bruce a meaningful look, he left, no doubt to go down to the cave and work on cutting the green rock into a pendant for Diana.

"Alfred seems out of sorts," Clark remarked, taking a sip of his juice. Bruce had poured himself a glass of scotch, and was intending to not let it out of his sight while Clark was in the room. He was still sure that Clark had thought he was doing something good when he'd drugged Bruce; that didn't mean he wanted it to happen again.

"He's mad that I let myself get hurt the other night," Bruce said blandly. The cut on his side was healing well, and the burn looked like it wasn't going to be too much of a problem, but he was still very aware of them tonight. At least his knee had healed to just mild soreness now.

Clark made a noncommittal noise, and asked, "You're really invested in getting those Viper dealers off the streets, aren't you?"

"I hate drugs." Bruce's fingers tightened on his glass for a moment, before he put it down and forced himself to calm down. It wasn't just knowing that Clark had drugged him; Bruce had hated Viper for a long time, and every time it started to show up in Gotham again, he stamped it out. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes, and said, "I'm not stupid enough to think I can get rid of all street drugs, but Viper has no redeeming qualities, and I won't have it in my city."

Clark's smile looked strange, knowing what Bruce knew, or at least suspected. "Still taking responsibility for the world, Bruce?"

"Gotham isn't the world," Bruce pointed out. "If we're going to accuse anyone of taking responsibility for the world, I don't think you can point any fingers."

Clark was on his feet before Bruce was aware of it, moving across the room to straddle Bruce's chair, up in his personal space yet again, although this time his hand moved up to trail lightly over Bruce's temple and into his hair, where grey was starting to pepper the brown.

"How old are you, Bruce?" Clark asked softly, brushing his thumb down over Bruce's jaw while he stroked his fingers through the hair at Bruce's temple. "You're what, in your forties? Most guys your age don't have this much grey. You're taking on too much. How long do you think you can keep it up?"

"And you're going to help?" Bruce challenged, although he didn't move back out of Clark's reach - not that it would have been easy to, with Clark's body trapping him in the armchair. His temper got the better of him; he snapped, "Like you helped the other night?"

Clark's smile changed, turning sharp-edged, and he shifted to settle his weight over Bruce's thighs, his knees resting on the chair on either side of Bruce's legs. He kept his hand on the side of Bruce's face and said, his tone dangerously gentle, "You _needed_ help the other night."

"Did I need Rohypnol?" Bruce retorted, pulling away from Clark's hand this time. "Get off me, Clark. We need to talk."

"We do need to talk," Clark said agreeably, but he didn't move. He traced his fingertips over the grey in Bruce's hair again, his other hand moving to rest on Bruce's side, over the still-healing gash. "You're more fragile than you like to think, Bruce. You don't let Alfred take care of you properly. Who else do you have? Have you even told Alfred what happened the other night?"

"Of course not," Bruce lied. Better that Clark have no reason to look at Alfred and see a threat. "I never asked you to take on that burden. My safety is my own responsibility. I don't need you swooping in to save the day by _drugging me_."

"Maybe the drugs were a mistake," Clark conceded. "But you haven't made a very good argument that you can take care of yourself. You could have bled out if I wasn't there. And you need more than just _not dying_ to be really alive, Bruce."

"Is that what this is about?" Bruce reminded himself that Clark had nearly died, not that long ago, and here he was talking about what you needed to be "really alive". "Clark, if you need to talk to someone about what happened to you, you know I'm always available, or I could-" Well, he couldn't _recommend_ anyone; he hadn't seen a counsellor even when he probably should have. He considered, and offered, "Wayne Enterprises has several therapists on staff; I could arrange something for you."

Clark let out a soft laugh. "I've never felt more _alive_."

Suddenly impatient, Bruce lifted his hands to press them against Clark's chest in an attempt to shove him off; just as suddenly, he snatched them back, letting out a soft hiss. Clark's chest was _hot_. Not burning, but palpably hot through his shirt.

Things suddenly made sense. The residue that had coated the edges of the wound, the glittering greenish-brown that had sunk into Clark's blood, making it clot faster. Bruce had cleaned the wound as quickly as he could, but it looked like it hadn't been quick enough. A temperature that high, over the scar - it could only be one thing. An infection, and one inflicted by a corruption of human/Kryptonian DNA and the green rock. No wonder Clark was acting strangely. God only knew what having that stuff locked inside him was doing to his system.

"Clark," he said softly, touching Clark's chest again, exploring the heat. Yes, it started at the site of the wound and radiated out. "Clark, you're sick. You need help."

" _I_ don't need help," Clark said, bending his head to press a light kiss to Bruce's throat, right over the pulse point. Bruce's breath caught in his throat. Clark's touches had bordered on sexual before, but they'd never crossed the line. (Had they?) Clark kissed him again, murmuring, "You need someone to take proper care of you. Both the way you want it and the way you need it."

"Clark." Realising that his hands on Clark's chest might have been taken as encouragement, Bruce pushed at Clark, trying futilely to dislodge him. Frustrated, he snapped, "What the hell are you talking about?"

"This." Clark moved his hand from Bruce's hair to his throat, squeezing very lightly. Bruce's breath stuttered, and he felt a surge of adrenaline-fed arousal rush through him, followed rapidly by suspicion.

"What did you do the other night?" he asked, dangerously quiet. "What happened that you needed to give me Rohypnol in case it went wrong?"

"Nothing you didn't want." Clark's hand moved on Bruce's throat, forcing his chin up, and he dropped a light, absurdly gentle kiss to Bruce's lips. "And you know you've wanted something like this for a long time, Bruce. You can't tell me you're not drawn to people like me and Diana because we're stronger than you are."

The accusation had an element of truth, but Bruce wasn't prepared to talk about that right now. He pulled away from the kiss, saying, "Get off me, Clark."

"No." Clark's smile was soft and gentle, as he tightened his fingers around Bruce's throat until it became difficult to breathe, and then tightened them further. "We've gone beyond talking now, Bruce. You need someone to take proper care of you."

His vision began to flicker, turning black at the edges from lack of air. Bruce knew how long the brain could survive without air; somehow, he knew Clark would be careful enough to not do damage. Clark had some insane definition of _helping_ Bruce, and choking him into brain damage probably wasn't on the list.

That wasn't reassuring.

_Don't interrupt, Alfred,_ Bruce thought, as unconsciousness loomed. Alfred knew his suspicions, would know what he should do to deal with the situation on his end while Bruce dealt with _his_ side of the situation. He couldn't do that if he interrupted them and ended up dead.

He was dimly aware of Clark letting go of his throat, once enough weakness had set in that Bruce was in no shape to fight back. Then a glass was held to his lips, and Clark murmured, his voice coming through an echoing tunnel, "Drink and sleep. You'll understand more when you wake up."

More drugs. He wasn't surprised, and he wasn't able to keep Clark from filling his mouth, stroking his throat until he swallowed. The liquid had a bitter aftertaste, and Bruce sighed. More sedatives. He was starting to wish he'd had that green rock pendant ready sooner.

On the other hand, how better to figure out how to fix Clark than spend more time with him?

He could feel Clark picking him up and heading for the nearest exit. The shock of cool night air on his face wasn't enough to break the hold of whatever drugs Clark had given him this time, but at least Alfred hadn't interrupted them.

He'd thought about flying with Clark before. Just not quite like this.

It wasn't an untenable situation yet. As unconsciousness took over, Bruce reminded himself of that. It wasn't an untenable situation yet. He'd survived the Joker - scarred, and with almost unbearable loss, but he'd survived. He'd survive this.


	4. I'll keep you by my side with my superhuman might

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce wakes up in not-his-lake house. He and Clark come to an accord that is ENTIRELY A TRICK on Bruce's part, and then Bruce puts the first part of his getting-Clark-fixed plan into play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes for this chapter: abduction, captivity, mild sexual activity that is all sorts of weird consent-wise, serious grossness involving voluntary combinations of animal poop and wounds at the end because Bruce is OTT.

Bruce's head was killing him when he woke up. At least this time there weren't any gaps in his memory; that was a small mercy, but one that he was grateful for as he slowly got to his feet to work out where the hell Clark had brought him.

The bedroom was generous, the sort of place Bruce had grown up in, that he'd assumed Clark would feel slightly out of place in. The bed sat in the centre, iron-framed and silk-sheeted, and Bruce didn't have the energy to appreciate either fact right now. He glanced down at himself and swore; Clark had undressed him at some point during the night, swapping out Bruce's work clothes for soft sweats that were undoubtedly more comfortable to sleep in. The intrusion still sat wrong.

The first door Bruce tried led to the bathroom, and he took advantage of that to rinse his mouth out and take a drink of cold water. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet, and that was a concern - Bruce used enough medication, both prescription and over the counter, on a daily basis that he wasn't looking forward to trying to get out of this particular mess while dealing with withdrawal.

Eventually, when he was feeling steady enough, he left the bathroom and the bedroom, going out into the rest of what turned out to be a penthouse apartment. From the view from the living room windows, it _wasn't_ the one that Clark had got for Superman in Metropolis - this one looked out over the nominally better part of Gotham.

It was a smart move. Even in the "good" part of Gotham, nobody was going to stick their neck out if they heard someone screaming.

Bruce took in the rest of the apartment in a quick glance; open-plan, comfortable. He could see another door leading to what he assumed was a second bathroom, a sliding door leading to a balcony where some pigeons were pecking idly at a planter.

There were options. The apartment was several floors up, and Bruce was still not at his best - his side was still healing, and there was some constriction in his movement, and the burn on his thigh still pulled when he extended his leg fully - but he could probably climb down the side of the building. He was pretty sure Clark would have taken precautions and done _something_ to the door to stop Bruce from just ramming it off its hinges, but he could still probably work it out sooner or later.

Of course, just _leaving_ wouldn't do anything to fix what was wrong with Clark.

Bruce sighed, going over the rest of the apartment. It was eerily familiar. If he wasn't looking at it from having been brought here against his will, he'd have suspected Clark was trying some sort of _courting_ gift. The place was decorated similarly to Bruce's lake house, albeit with brighter colours and more overtly comfortable furniture. Bruce's furniture wasn't _uncomfortable_ , but this place was furnished with overstuffed armchairs and the sort of long couch that looked comfortable enough to fall asleep on. The kitchen was up-to-date without being _modern_ ; Bruce could see Clark's Smallville upbringing in the wood panelling and the gas oven.

Clark was nowhere to be found, and that was irritating. Bruce had work to do, and he couldn't _do_ it without Clark there. He needed Clark there so he could come up with a pretext to examine him and find the source of the infection - he was pretty sure it was the chest wound, but he needed confirmation. He couldn't figure out how to help Clark if Clark _wasn't there_.

Still, there was a way to make a start without Clark's presence. He'd need some of the green rock eventually, and he couldn't exactly ask Clark for any of it.

Exploring the kitchen, he found a loaf of bread. He took a couple of slices and tore them up into crumbs, sprinkling them onto the balcony where the pigeons had congregated. Two or three were there already, but he needed more than that if this particular plan was going to work.

When Clark did eventually show up, an hour or so after Bruce woke up, Bruce's first words were, "You're going to need to let me write to Alfred or he'll realise something's wrong."

Clark was quiet for a moment, giving him a long look, and then said, "All right. Tell him you're away on League business."

It was a reasonable excuse, although it didn't work with the closeness of Bruce and Alfred's relationship, but that would work in Bruce's favour. He took the pen and paper Clark handed him and wrote a quick note, telling Alfred that Clark had brought news of some urgent League business and they'd both gone to deal with it. Glancing at Clark, who was making a point of not watching him write, he added a postscript.

> _I think I owe Diana some appreciation for her assistance lately. See if you can find the jade pendant that we got for Mom's birthday when I was eight._

Bruce's mother had been at the hospital on her birthday when Bruce was eight, because Bruce had had a stupid childhood accident that had ended up with a broken wrist. And she'd rarely worn green; she'd said it didn't go with her colouring. Alfred would know what Bruce meant.

Clark read over the note when Bruce finished it, but he didn't seem to see anything out of order with it; he folded it and put it in an envelope, saying, "I'll see that he gets it. That's a nice thought, about Diana."

"She's been going to a lot of effort for us," Bruce said, shrugging. "And the jewellery isn't going anywhere."

Clark gave him a smile that looked like Clark's _real_ smile for a moment and said, "I'll go put this in the box."

Bruce could see the street from the kitchen window; he watched Clark put the envelope into the post box, and shook his head. Clark was _not good_ at this. Alfred would see the postmark and know that Bruce hadn't sent the letter of his own free will; if he'd been in Gotham long enough to post a letter, he would have called or stopped at the lake house, to talk to Alfred in person. Posting it from another city, even one as close as Metropolis, would have helped muddy the scent. Even with the infection altering his behaviour, Clark clearly didn't have duplicity in him.

It was a reassuring fact; Clark hadn't changed _that_ much. Bruce hadn't been lying when he'd told Alfred that he'd thought Clark had been acting out of some strange urge to _help_. He always made so much of how fragile Bruce was, and wouldn't it seem that way to someone whose skin was normally impossible to scratch? How frustrating must it have been for Clark to come by every week and see bruises and cuts, to possibly use his x-ray vision and see old, long-healed breaks layered over each other, evidence upon evidence of how often Bruce got hurt? Bruce had never been bothered by it - he'd chosen this life, and the pain and nightmares that came with it - but he could see how, in his current state, it could have got under Clark's skin.

That realisation cemented it; he wasn't going to leave until he figured out how to make Clark better. There was still a good man inside the sickness making him behave this way, and Bruce wasn't about to give up on him.

By the time Clark got back upstairs, Bruce had ransacked the kitchen and got started on making breakfast. He wasn't sure what time it was - one thing he'd noticed was conspicuously absent from the apartment was _clocks_ \- but it _felt_ like morning, and breakfast was a comfortingly normal way to start a day. The refrigerator and cabinets were fully stocked, making Bruce suspect that Clark had been planning this for a while, but he shoved that thought to the back of his mind and set to making omelettes.

Clark looked surprised to see him working at the counter, and he hesitated at the door. Bruce glanced up, taking in the door's thickness and the number of locks in a quick look before raising his eyebrows at Clark, who looked suddenly self-conscious and closed (and locked, of course, Bruce noted) the door behind himself, moving further into the apartment.

"I wasn't expecting you to settle in this quickly," Clark said eventually. "I have to admit, _cooking_ wasn't high on the list of things I thought you'd be doing."

"Did you expect me to jump out the window?" Bruce asked, his tone mild. "We both know you'd catch me before I got to the ground. Fighting you isn't going to end well. But we need to talk about this, Clark."

Clark sighed. "It's for your own good, Bruce. I'm sure Alfred means well, but he can't-"

"If you want me to stay here, I need my medication," Bruce interrupted, his tone still mild. "And we need to set some ground rules."

_Now_ Clark looked intrigued. He moved to sit at the island counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the apartment, keeping it between them, like a concession towards giving Bruce personal space, and asked, "What sort of ground rules?"

"No more drugs."

"But you just said-"

"Medication isn't _drugs_." Bruce's voice hardened as he said it, and his hand tightened around the whisk he was using to whip the eggs into lightness. "If you go back to the lake house and check the top drawer of the bedroom bureau, everything there is prescription. I'll be a lot more _understanding_ of this little game if you bring those back for me. If you don't, then I might just decide it's worth trying to climb down the side of the building. I control what goes into my body, and that includes _stopping_ something I've been taking. That's not negotiable."

There was silence for a moment, and then Clark nodded. "All right. What else?"

"I need to be in touch with Wayne Enterprises." He poured the egg mixture into a pan and added mushrooms, not bothering to look at Clark now. "It's my _company_ , Clark, and a lot of people depend on its survival. I can work remotely, but I can't just up and disappear with no warning. I need to at least tell them I'm taking a sabbatical."

This time, the silence was longer, and then Clark said, "If I agree to that, what do I get in return?"

Bruce's smile was sardonic. "Staying here isn't enough?"

Clark laughed softly. "We both know I can make you stay here, Bruce. This is just working out how to make it easier for both of us. I don't want to have to start resorting to physical restraints."

_That_ thought shouldn't have been arousing, and Bruce firmly told his body to quit its shit. He considered, prodding the omelette in the pan and flipping it. So Clark wanted to keep him out of harm's way, but was willing to go to some pretty extreme measures to do that. It was interesting, and another time he might have been flattered, but right now it was more irritating than anything else.

He lifted his free hand to rub over his throat, brushing over the bruises there, and glanced over his shoulder. Clark was watching him like a hawk, his eyes dark with something that looked a hell of a lot like lust as he watched Bruce touching the bruises, and as awkward as it was going to be once Bruce got Clark back in his right mind, it _did_ give him both leverage and a way to get a closer look at Clark to work out the source of the infection.

"You seem to like manhandling me," Bruce said, injecting idleness into his tone as he set the first omelette onto a plate and put it on the counter, pushing it over to Clark. "Let me deal with Wayne Enterprises the way I feel I need to in order to keep things operational, and I won't complain when you feel like doing that again."

"All right." Clark accepted the food, still watching Bruce. "What else?"

"Manhandling aside, you don't do anything I haven't agreed to," Bruce said bluntly. That was more for Clark's benefit than his own. He'd slept with plenty of people that he hadn't been particularly interested in for anything beyond cover or company for the night or getting access to information they had, but he had the feeling that Clark was a lot more scrupulous than he was - at least, when he was in his right mind. He didn't want to bring Clark back only to have him wallowing in guilt because he thought he'd done something unforgivable to Bruce. Establishing guidelines for consent _now_ was safer.

"I can live with that."

Clark smiled, and again, it looked slightly _wrong_. Bruce was used to Clark's open, warm smile, not this slightly predatory grin that wouldn't look out of place on a society playboy at some high-brow function. He ignored his unease, finishing the second omelette and sitting down opposite Clark to eat.

Swallowing hurt. Bruce grimaced, wishing for some of the painkillers that he'd made Clark promise to fetch, and said, "One more thing. No more choking. I'm tired of having trouble eating after I see you."

"No," Clark said slowly, giving Bruce a long look, his gaze moving slowly. "No, you need to be able to eat. No more choking."

_That_ felt almost insulting. It wasn't as though Bruce was some starving waif who couldn't afford to miss a single meal. He was just tired of his throat burning when he swallowed.

Breakfast passed in a silence that should have felt awkward, but somehow didn't. Clark said, "Leave the dishes. I always do them, anyway."

"Right. Super-speed," Bruce said. It felt like a strange thing to use superpowers on, but even people with superpowers had to do chores, he supposed. He wasn't going to complain about not having to deal with it.

He _did_ feel like complaining about having to deal with the low-level pain that was starting to creep in without his usual painkillers, but he wasn't sure he wanted to be quite that open with Clark, not yet. Instead, he said, "Remember to get those meds, Clark," and retreated to the bathroom. Heat was an alternative way of dealing with the shoulder pain, at least, and it wasn't out of the question to have a shower at... whatever time of day it was. Not knowing for sure was getting frustrating.

If Clark had removed the clocks on purpose, Bruce was going to hit him, as futile an effort as it was. It would be satisfying anyway.

He didn't hear Clark leave or return over the sound of the water. When he shut off the shower and came out of the bathroom, Clark was waiting in the bedroom, but at least the medication Bruce had not-quite- _asked_ him to get was _also_ in the bedroom, neatly lined up on the bedside table, the stack of prescriptions tucked under a paperweight, a glass of water sitting next to the row of bottles.

He'd changed back into the sweatpants after the shower, not comfortable enough in the apartment to walk around in a towel, and the flash of disappointment in Clark's eyes when he came out of the bathroom showed him another way to guide things in his favour if he ended up needing Clark to feel like he owed Bruce a favour. Putting that thought to the back of his mind, he sat down on the edge of the bed and found the bottle containing the painkillers he took in the morning, washing them down with a swallow of water, and startled when Clark came to sat down beside him, lightly touching Bruce's shoulder.

"You're holding yourself differently," Clark said quietly, his hand gentle on Bruce's shoulder. "How bad is it?"

Bruce gave an uncomfortable shrug. Repeated dislocations made their mark; he was used to the ache, and the heat had helped, but the painkillers would help more. Repeated _breaks_ elsewhere left lingering pain in their wake, and he was used to _that_ , too, but things added up, injuries that had happened too close together, the occasional thing that had healed just the slightest bit wrong, and these days it wasn't just easier to function with a bit of help, that bit of help was _necessary_ sometimes. Some days he could ride it out with gritted teeth and a bad mood, but those days were getting less and less frequent.

He didn't complain about it, even to Alfred. It was the price of the life he'd chosen, just like the nightmares that were sometimes medicated away and sometimes chased away by just being too damn exhausted to dream.

"Bruce." Clark let out a soft sigh. "You said you'd let me take care of you."

"I never actually said that," Bruce pointed out. "And what are you supposed to do, Clark? Go back in time and stop me from becoming the Bat in the first place?"

"Lie down." Clark pushed on Bruce's shoulder, gently enough that Bruce was pretty sure he could resist if he wanted to. He didn't; he wanted to see where this was going. He couldn't just up and ask Clark to strip down without even Clark's usually-sunny disposition getting suspicious, so playing along for a few days was necessary, and this seemed reasonably harmless. Clark urged him to lie down on his stomach, and he rested his chin on his folded arms, gazing at the wall behind the bed and going over his projected timeline in his head.

The smell of burning fabric caught his attention, and he turned his head in time to see Clark's heat vision fade, the Kryptonian pulling the back of Bruce's sweatshirt up off his back. Bruce raised his eyebrows, and Clark said, "I thought this was better than having you raise your arms."

"You could have _asked_ ," Bruce pointed out, settling back on the bed. "The pants stay, for the record."

Clark's hands on his back weren't a surprise; the fact that they were the _only_ part of Clark touching him was. After a moment, though, he figured it out, and said dryly, "You're floating, aren't you."

"I don't want to touch you too much and risk hurting you," Clark said, starting a careful, thorough massage.

"Thoughtful," Bruce muttered, dropping his chin to his arms again and making himself relax. Clark was inexpert but earnest, and that counted for enough to make it enjoyable, if not particularly _therapeutic_. Bruce had had enough of both types of massage to know the difference; Clark wasn't making him hurt enough for it to be really doing much good, but it still felt nice, and under any other circumstances, he probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. As it was, it was difficult to relax properly, given he'd started to treat this as a situation where he needed to be _on_ from the moment he woke up.

That couldn't be helped, though, and would probably end up saving them. He doubted Clark knew him well enough to be able to spot the difference; very few people did. Sometimes he thought Alfred was the only one who did.

"Your shoulders," Clark said, after a few minutes. "Why do they hurt?"

"Multiple dislocations," Bruce answered. There was no real harm in answering; Clark could already find Bruce's weak spots just by looking at him the right way, and Bruce's plans didn't involve a physical altercation anyway. He glanced back over his shoulder; like he'd thought, Clark was hovering above him, reaching down to massage his back and shoulders.

"How many times have you broken your ribs?" Clark asked, frowning a little. "I can see the marks in the bone, but not how old each one is."

"Christ." Bruce shook his head. "I don't keep count, Clark. I get hurt; I heal. It's routine."

Clark's lips thinned. "I don't like it."

"I got that."

Another few minutes of silence, and then Clark asked, "How's your knee feeling?"

"Better," Bruce said, considering. "The other one's the one that's been dislocated more often, so I didn't need the brace this time."

The noise Clark made was amusingly distressed. " _Bruce_. You're going to end up falling apart."

Bruce's laugh was muffled against his arms. "I've been falling apart for a long time, Clark. I manage."

Clark's hands lifted from his back, and the mattress dipped as Clark sat down beside him. Bruce turned onto his side to look at Clark, his mood a little better now that the pain had eased somewhat; he still wasn't _happy_ about the situation, but he could see the concern behind Clark's unreasonable actions, could see the good man behind the irrationality. He could get them both through it.

"How long have you been doing this on your own?" Clark asked, his voice very soft as he reached out to tug the remnant of the sweatshirt away from Bruce's chest. Bruce let him; it wasn't as though it was a particularly useful bit of clothing anymore. Clark tossed it aside and then resumed touching him, his fingertips feather-light over fading scars, tracing each one like he wanted to memorise it.

"Long enough to get used to it."

It was an evasion, and Bruce knew it, but there were some things Clark didn't and couldn't know. Jason was a spectre that Bruce flat-out didn't talk about, and Dick was an ace up his sleeve; neither of them were subjects for conversation right now. He didn't think Clark had done more than cursory research into Bruce Wayne, anyway, if that; the boys that the playboy billionaire had adopted years ago wouldn't have figured into the news these days.

Clark sighed, leaning in to press his lips to the space where Bruce's collarbones met, below the band of bruising from the night before. His hand rested lightly, almost idly, on Bruce's stomach, his other arm supporting himself, and Bruce could feel the heat radiating off his chest.

Hoping that Clark would forgive him for it when he was in his right mind again, Bruce said to the ceiling, "If you're going to be doing that, you'd better take your shirt off too. It'll get in the way."

Clark's lips went still against his skin for a moment, and then Bruce felt them curve into a smile. He pulled away long enough to do as Bruce had suggested, tugging off his shirt and tossing it aside, and then settled beside Bruce again, one arm slung over Bruce's side to keep him still, pressing soft, almost delicate kisses to his throat.

The scar tissue on his chest was _definitely_ discoloured, and when Clark pressed against his side, Bruce could feel heat radiating from the place where Doomsday had stabbed Clark.

That was going to make fixing things _messy_ and painful and incredibly not-fun for both of them, but he'd figure it out all the same. He owed Clark that much.

Clark seemed content with kissing his throat for now, making a pleased sound against him when Bruce wrapped an arm around him, idly rubbing his hand over Clark's back as he checked the exit wound. No heat there, at least; it looked as though whatever the cause of infection, it wasn't through the entire wound, at least. That was _something_.

Distracted by his examination of Clark, and his subsequent relief, Bruce was startled when Clark shifted him onto his back, climbing on top of him to straddle his hips - and using his flight to keep from resting too much weight on him, he realised with a tinge of annoyance, like he was going to break from _sex_.

Not that sex seemed to be what Clark was after, exactly. He seemed to just want to be able to pin Bruce down as he explored his body, keeping things _relatively_ tame for the time being - Bruce had specified that his pants stayed, he recalled, and Clark seemed to be honouring that, staying above Bruce's waist as he pressed light kisses and gentle, almost playful bites to his stomach and chest, carefully avoiding the still-bandaged cut on his side. When Bruce reached up - to do what, he wasn't sure - Clark pinned his wrist to the bed, but his grip was gently firm, and Bruce didn't fight it. Clark would remember, he was fairly sure, and he didn't want Clark remembering Bruce fighting him.

After a little while, Clark's head snapped up and he sighed, saying, "I should go and take care of that. You'll be all right for a while?"

Bruce let out a shaky laugh. Things had started to heat up a little more than he was comfortable with right now, considering how Clark might react when he was back in his right mind, and a part of him was relieved that Clark was still paying attention to what was going on out in the world. He gave Clark's back another light pat with his free hand, saying, "I'll be fine. Go be Superman. And bring me a burner phone so I can call Wayne Enterprises tomorrow." When Clark hesitated, Bruce added, "We can pick this up when you get back."

Clark gave his throat one last kiss and got to his feet, giving Bruce another smile that hovered between warm and predatory before leaving via the window.

Bruce sighed, scrubbing his hands through his hair. Things were all too easily getting out of hand, but he'd at least gotten confirmation of what he'd suspected; the chest wound had become infected, somehow, and that infection was altering Clark's behaviour. He wasn't too surprised, now that he had the facts. There were plenty of studies about infections altering mental states, even _without_ the added complication of Clark's Kryptonian physiology, the human/Kryptonian physiology of Doomsday having been the cause of the injury, _and_ the introduction of the green rock to the injury site. Add emotional trauma to the mix, and it all made perfect sense.

It was also the basis of Bruce's plan for how to get his hands on enough green rock to subdue Clark so he could try to excise the infected tissue, and had been the basis for his message to Alfred.

Now that Clark was gone, Bruce rummaged in the bathroom until he found a razor. Breaking it apart to get proper access to the blade, he headed to the kitchen to collect a roll of paper towel. Then he went out to the balcony, where he'd spread breadcrumbs to entice more birds. He'd hoped that there would be enough this early on, and he was in luck; a veritable flock had come for the easy pickings, all the dingy grey pigeons that festooned the buildings of Gotham - and, more pertinently to his plan, their droppings. Grimacing, he gathered the freshest and peeled back the bandage over the sutured cut in his side.

A swift cut with the razorblade broke the sutures, and he re-opened the deepest part of the cut, using a wad of paper towel to keep the blood from spattering onto the balcony tiles. 

It _had_ been healing well.

"This is going to be disgusting," Bruce muttered. But if he was going to be in the emergency room to collect the green rock from whoever Alfred found to deliver it, he'd need a good reason to be there, something that Clark couldn't fix, and an infection was a good reason. Sighing, he ground the pigeon droppings into the cut, gritting his teeth at the pain, making sure to get the muck as deep into the wound as he could.

It wasn't going to be fun. But he doubted Clark would look back on the last few weeks with anything but regret, once he was better, so it would be worth it. He closed the wound with a few butterfly bandages and taped the covering bandage back over it, going back inside to get rid of the dismantled razor (shoved down the drain in the bathroom floor) and the bloodied paper towel (ripped into pieces and flushed separately, to avoid clogging). He washed his hands and made sure that there was no outward sign of what he'd done, and then, lacking anything else to do while he waited for Clark to come back, did the dishes, feeling grumpily like Clark was trying to domesticate him.

It was a waiting game now.


	5. Even heroes have the right to bleed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark steps up his seducing-Bruce game; Bruce lets him. Later, a visit to the hospital yields the key to the next step in Bruce's game plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update, guys; work and RL have been hectic. Updates are going to every two weeks from now on, so that I feel less stressed about it. I have everything planned out, though, don't worry :)
> 
> Content notes for this chapter: sex that's got really dubious consent, medical stuff of the non-kinky sort, controlling behaviour on Clark's part.

Bruce had never been good at being domestic. Maybe he would have been, if his life had gone a different way, but he doubted it; he just didn't have the sort of personality that lent itself to being comfortable staying at home and doing the simple, necessary domestic tasks that kept a place running. He respected the people who did - Martha Kent was certainly no slouch, as far as Bruce was concerned - but he didn't have the temperament for it himself, and after only one day of confinement, it was starting to wear on him.

Clark had come back the day before, smelling of smoke and with soot smudged on one cheekbone and the shoulder of his suit, but the suit itself was undamaged, and Clark, of course, didn't have a scratch on him. Bruce had wondered idly whether the fire had been as hot as the fever burning through the Kryptonian, but he'd kept that to himself, instead asking mildly, "Busy day?"

"It's not over yet," Clark had said, letting out a sigh. "Mom's expecting me for dinner. You'll be all right?"

Bruce had waved a hand dismissively. "Go. I've spent longer than this alone and been just fine. Did you pick up the burner phone I asked for?"

Clark had gave him a long look. "It's a little hard to just stop in at a store when I'm dressed like this. I'll get something in Smallville, and we'll have a talk."

That had been the night before. Clark hadn't returned from Smallville until late, and Bruce had still been feeling off from the drugs that Clark had given him to get him there in the first place; he'd been asleep by the time Clark returned. He hadn't seen much point in waiting up; it would only make him look paranoid in Clark's eyes, and he reasoned that Clark might think he was getting comfortable with the place if he returned and found Bruce asleep.

Waking somewhere that wasn't the lake house still had him on edge, but he went through the motions of a morning routine, noting with a certain amount of satisfaction that while Clark had stocked the apartment more than adequately, the brands he'd selected weren't Bruce's preference; he didn't know Bruce _that_ well.

Clark was nowhere to be seen, and by the time Bruce had finished breakfast and cleaned up the kitchen, he was _bored_. He'd never been good at idleness; even if he wasn't doing something as the Bat, he was used to handling Wayne Enterprises business on his off days. Clark would show up when he showed up, though, and Bruce's plan for getting his hands on enough green rock to subdue Clark was a little longer-term than could be dealt with today, so he wasn't too bothered by Clark's absence except that it left him with nothing meaningful to _do_.

Finally, out of a lack of other options rather than any real curiosity, he explored the rest of the penthouse. One of the rooms he hadn't seen the day before was a small personal gym; Clark had evidently worked out that forcing Bruce to stay inactive was going to end badly for them both. Bruce spent a bit of time doing stretches to ensure that the leg with the cauterised wound would still retain full movement, and then started on the treadmill.

The gash in his side had been aching that morning, a little more than it had the day before, but giving himself a workout would help incubate the infection, as well as making sure that Clark's little game didn't get him out of condition.

Clark showed up just in time to catch Bruce coming out of the shower. Bruce didn't entirely trust that Clark hadn't planned it that way, but he didn't let it bother him; he _had_ implied, the day before, that he was willing to let things go a bit further, and he needed to lull Clark into a sense of security until the infection had progressed to the point where Bruce could use it. Giving Clark what he wanted was the best way to do that.

Ignoring the fact that he was wearing a towel, Bruce gave Clark a mild look and asked, "Did you get that phone?"

Clark took a phone out of his pocket - an old flip phone, not the sort of phone that Bruce could connect to the Internet, but Bruce had expected that, given the lack of anything resembling a computer and the lack of _clocks_ \- but he didn't hold it out yet. Instead, he said, "We're going to need to discuss some ground rules."

Ground rules. Like he was a teenager getting his first smartphone. Bruce raised his eyebrows, asking, "What sort of ground rules?"

"You can call your company," Clark said. "Let them know you're taking some time off. But I don't want you trying to tell them what's going on, or calling anyone else and pretending it's your company."

Bruce gave Clark a hard look. "I already told you I'd stay. And my employees are ordinary people. I'm not going to drag them into something that's between the two of us."

Clark hesitated, and then held out the phone. "I'm going to trust you with this, Bruce. Don't disappoint me."

Bruce ignored Clark's presence - and the fact that he was _still_ only wearing a towel - as he took the phone and dialled the PA of the Board Chairman of Wayne Enterprises. Bruce was a more involved owner than some, but the company still ran itself in his absence; that helped, in this situation. Nobody was going to go without their paycheck or their insurance because he and Clark were having _issues_.

"Simon," he said lightly, when he was put through to the chairman. "It's Bruce. I need to take some time off. You and the Board can handle things for a few weeks, can't you?"

"Of course," his Chairman assured him. There was something off in his voice, an odd sort of relief. "Take as much time as you need, Mr Wayne. We'll all be here when you're feeling better."

Bruce finished the call quickly, after checking that a few of the projects he was particularly interested in were on-track; the notion that his Board was _worried_ about him and wanted him to take some time off to "get better" was a strange one, and one that he didn't particularly want to think about right now.

Clark was watching him as he finished the phone call. He closed the flip phone and set it on the bedside table as though he was unaware of Clark's scrutiny, going over to the bureau and taking out a pair of slacks and a shirt.

Before he could turn away from the bureau, Clark was behind him, pressing up against his back. Bruce didn't object or try to push Clark away; at this stage, keeping Clark both happy and ignorant was the easiest way to manage things. He was aware that "keep him happy" was a particularly unhealthy way for _anyone_ to be thinking, but he shoved that thought aside. He'd done plenty of things that most people would consider unhealthy, over the years; play-acting Clark's strange vision of domesticity was far from the most dangerous.

Clark rested one of his hands on Bruce's hip, the other drifting up to rest on Bruce's throat, although after their conversation the day before, he didn't hold firmly; Bruce was pretty sure that if he really wanted to, he could pull out of Clark's grip. He didn't, though, holding himself still as Clark pressed a soft kiss to the back of his neck.

"You throw yourself at the world over and over," Clark murmured, his lips brushing against the nape of Bruce's neck. "Even when the world sends you back bruised and broken, you don't let that stop you. You have no idea how _refreshing_ that is."

"You think I'm any better than the other people who've been hurt?" Bruce asked, affronted. Lois had told him that she'd worked out that Wallace Keefe had been manipulated by Luthor, that he hadn't intended the bombing at all, but that didn't change the fact that he'd been in a place to be manipulated in the first place because he'd been hurt, and Bruce didn't like the implication that Clark thought _he_ was better than anyone else who'd been hurt just because he dealt with it through vigilantism.

Clark chuckled softly, kissing the back of Bruce's neck again, and said, "And you're so _angry_ all the time. Don't you ever get tired?"

Bruce let out a quiet, sardonic laugh. "I get tired all the time, Clark. It doesn't mean I stop fighting."

"You don't have to fight anymore," Clark said, his tone coaxing. He stroked his thumb lightly over Bruce's hip, just above the towel. "You can let me take care of you."

Bruce turned his head to look at Clark over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows, and asked, "What _is_ this, Clark?"

It wasn't a no, and that seemed to encourage Clark. He kissed Bruce's shoulder and said, "Everyone always says you should take what you want. I want to take care of you."

"You have a weird way of showing it," Bruce said. Clark was still rubbing his thumb over Bruce's hip, and Bruce weighed up the options. He didn't think Clark would force the issue if he really said no, but he still needed at least a day before he could make his next move; indulging Clark would keep him busy and keep him from wondering what Bruce might have planned.

The issue remained of what Clark would think when he came back to his right mind, but Bruce would cross that bridge when he came to it; all things considered, he was more concerned about getting Clark _better_ than worrying too much about whether things were going to be strained between them afterwards.

Clark sighed against his shoulder, his lips hot against Bruce's skin, and Bruce, after a moment, leaned back against Clark rather than forward against the bureau, saying quietly, "All right."

Clark didn't respond overtly right away; he kept kissing Bruce's shoulder, tightening his arms around Bruce a little, although in deference to their conversation the day before, his hold wasn't exactly constricting. His fingers stroked over Bruce's throat gently; bizarrely, the reminder of the tighter hold, the one that had raised bruises, was what sent a little sizzle of arousal through Bruce.

He was used to pretending sexual interest when he didn't feel it, but that didn't look like it was going to be a problem here. Something about Clark was appealing in a way that few other people had been; whether it was that Clark had got closer than Bruce had let almost anyone else, or because Clark was one of the few people who could actually overpower Bruce, he wasn't sure. Either was possible. Bruce was well aware that he had a _thing_ about being overpowered that psychologists would probably have a field day with.

After a moment, Clark moved his hand from Bruce's hip to where the towel was tucked to keep it up, working his fingers under the knot to loosen it. He kept kissing Bruce's shoulder as he loosened the towel enough to slip his hand underneath it, moving slowly as though he expected Bruce to pull away.

Bruce didn't. As long as he kept Clark's suspicion away from the bandage on his side, he could handle whatever Clark decided constituted "taking care" of him.

Clark stayed pressed up against Bruce's back, the warmth radiating from his chest a reminder of _why_ Bruce was steadying himself against the bureau as Clark wrapped his hand around his cock, his other hand light but present on Bruce's throat. The brush of Clark's fingers over the fading bruises on Bruce's throat was almost as arousing as the brush of his thumb over the head of his cock, and the way Clark let out a quiet sigh against his shoulder almost made Bruce feel bad about the pretence.

Almost.

Clark's arms were strong around him, at once reassuring and confining. He kept pressing soft kisses to Bruce's shoulder and the back of his neck as he stroked him, murmuring, "Let go for me, Bruce. Let me take care of you."

Bruce was used to performing in bed. This wasn't technically _in bed_ , but the principle was the same. He never really let go around anyone except Alfred, so he refused to let himself feel bad for not doing it now; this was a survival situation for both of them, as far as he was concerned. Clark would understand later.

And if he didn't, well, Bruce would cope with the fallout once Clark was _himself_ again.

He wrapped his hands around the edge of the bureau to help keep his balance, forcing himself _not_ to bite back the low moan that rose as Clark rubbed his thumb over the head of his cock again. Sounds would help, he told himself; they would make Clark happier. They certainly seemed to; as he let out another soft moan, Clark wedged his knee between Bruce's thighs, forcing his legs further apart and keeping him off-balance enough to need to rely on Clark to keep him upright.

Fine. Clark wanted it that way, _fine_.

Instead of focusing on keeping control the way he normally did in all aspects of his life, Bruce concentrated on keeping control of the _act_ , letting his body respond without thinking about it. He could feel his cheeks burning as he heard the soft, sharp cries that echoed in the overlarge bedroom; he was _never_ this loud, and something about it made him feel self-conscious. But it encouraged and reassured Clark, and that was the point.

When he came, Clark cleaned him up with the towel and led him over to the bed, urging him to lie down on his stomach. Bruce hesitated for a moment, but Clark gave him a light kiss and said, "Relax. You're too tense. I'm going to give you a rubdown."

Massage. Well, that was fine; Alfred had done that more times that Bruce could count. He settled onto his stomach, biting back a wince at the twinge of pain from the gash on his stomach; he kept the expression from showing, resting his chin on his folded arms.

Clark had magic hands. He worked Bruce over slowly, giving every set of muscles close attention until it felt like he had no muscles at all. Between the orgasm and his earlier workout, and now this sort of intense relaxation, Bruce lost hold of his control, and slipped into sleep without realising it.

 

The morning of the fourth day, Bruce woke up with a hot pain in his side. He got out of bed and went into the bathroom, peeling the bandage back to inspect the wound.

It looked perfect. That was, it looked red and inflamed, the flesh around the gash was tight and swollen, pulling at the stitches that Bruce hadn't intentionally popped - although a few more had popped of their own volition due to the swelling - and the bandage was stained with bloody pus. Not the sort of thing that he could treat at home - and not the sort of thing that Clark could just take care of on his own.

He could feel his own fever, and looking in the mirror, it was obvious that he wasn't well. Clark would pick it up as soon as he arrived, and Bruce could move on to the next step of the plan.

Until then, he wasn't feeling up to making breakfast today. The idea of food made him feel even more nauseated, so he taped a fresh bandage over the gash and returned to bed to wait for Clark to come by.

Time got a bit foggy then, the way it always did when Bruce was stupid enough to get an infected wound. He dozed, ignoring the passage of time until he heard the balcony door slide open. There was a silence, and Bruce figured Clark was looking around the apartment, trying to figure out where he was. And then, a moment later, he appeared in the bedroom doorway.

"Bruce?" he asked quietly, his brow furrowed in a frown. "You're usually up long before now. Are you all right?"

Bruce managed a smile, although he was pretty sure it wasn't a smile _he'd_ want aimed at him. He hadn't put a shirt back on, and he slowly lifted a hand to trace the edge of the bandage, not quite touching it. Touch was going to be difficult to tolerate today.

"I've got a bit of a problem," he said, making it sound like an admission.

Clark didn't wait for more of an explanation. He came over to the bed, sitting beside Bruce, and his hands were gentle as he peeled back the bandage. He drew in a sharp breath at the sight of the wound, his hands hovering over it like he wasn't sure what to do.

He probably wasn't, Bruce realised. Martha was careful, so there probably hadn't been any bad injuries on the farm that hadn't been taken care of at a hospital, and with very few exceptions, Lois didn't go into situations where she was likely to get hurt this badly. Clark wouldn't exactly be abounding in wound care lesson opportunities.

"How did this happen?" Clark asked, his voice worried in a way that sounded like the _real_ Clark, not the green rock-affected one. "I thought we treated this."

Bruce sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. His vision was swimming, just a little. "You stitched it, but that doesn't necessarily prevent infection."

"This can't be the first time you've had an infection," Clark said, reaching up to squeeze Bruce's shoulder. "How do we fix it?"

"We don't." Bruce sighed again. "I could have stopped it if I'd caught it earlier, if I had my medical suite back at the lake house, but this far in, I can't handle it."

"All right." Clark squeezed Bruce's shoulder again, leaning down to press a gentle kiss to his forehead. "I'll take you to the emergency room. Just... remember our deal, Bruce. Don't do anything stupid."

They didn't fly. Clark was still dressed in civilian clothing, and Bruce had worked out where the penthouse was early on the first day; Martha Wayne Memorial Hospital wasn't far away. Clark helped Bruce get dressed and led him downstairs and into a nondescript car, looking concerned the whole time.

Bruce had to admit, Clark had reason to look concerned. Bruce's fever was high enough that he was having trouble focusing, and his limbs felt weak and boneless. He let Clark hover until they were in the car, and then Clark had to turn his attention to the road.

Pretending to be someone else in the emergency room wasn't going to work; Bruce's face was well-known in Gotham, and _someone_ would recognise him. He pointed that out to Clark on the way to the hospital, and Clark made a face before agreeing, saying, "All right. I've got your wallet with your ID if you need it."

Of course Clark had his wallet. Bruce hadn't even wondered about that until now. He didn't have the energy to worry about it, either; he half-dozed until the car pulled up in the lot outside the hospital and the chill of the autumn air hit his face when Clark opened the door.

The nurse at the triage desk looked concerned, and Bruce wasn't sure whether it was because he looked that bad or because _Bruce Wayne_ had just walked into her emergency room. She handed over the paperwork wordlessly, and Bruce thought her hand was shaking for a moment when he heard the rattle of paper, until he realised that it was _his_ hand trembling that was making the paper shake. He gave her a smile that was a shadow of his usual Bruce Wayne charm and retreated to sit down next to Clark and fill them out.

Then it was yet another waiting game. Bruce spent most of it alternately dozing and convincing Clark not to go and bother the triage nurse; the people going through before them were people with actively bleeding wounds or heart problems or diabetic ketosis, he pointed out wearily for the fifth time, sometime around the second hour. He'd made it this long with the infection; another few hours wasn't going to kill him.

"It better not," Clark growled, quietly enough that Bruce was the only one to hear him. He hadn't left Bruce's side once since they'd arrived at the hospital, and Bruce didn't think it was just because he wanted to make sure Bruce didn't try anything.

Eventually, a doctor came to lead them back into an examination room and talk to Bruce. She obviously knew exactly who Bruce was, but she was subtle about it - at least, until she saw the infected cut. _Then_ all semblance of subtlety fled, replaced with concern and veiled glances thrown Clark's way, as though _he_ might be responsible for the cut.

Bruce was just glad the bruises on his throat had faded enough to not be readily visible anymore, if the doctor was giving Clark that sort of look.

"I got mugged last week on a business trip in Bludhaven," he said lightly. "The doctors there gave me a bunch of care instructions, but I guess I must not have followed them properly."

The doctor sighed. "Evidently not. This is a _very_ bad infection, Mr Wayne. I'm going to have to try to clean it out here and get you on a course of very strong antibiotics."

"As bad as the ones I had to take when I had the flu?" Bruce asked innocently, vaguely amused when the doctor winced.

"Antibiotics aren't really useful for the flu, Mr Wayne," she said, her voice that long-suffering one that said she'd told countless people not to treat viruses with antibiotics and was resigned to telling countless more. "But yes, probably as bad as those ones. This is a _bad_ infection, Mr Wayne. We don't want it getting into your blood."

"All right," Bruce sighed, giving her a dramatic look. "I guess we'd better get to it, then."

"Do you want to step out for a few minutes, sir?" she asked, looking at Clark. "It's not a pretty process."

"I'm fine."

Clark's voice was firm, and Bruce could hear the barely-restrained violence underlying the firmness. The doctor didn't seem to spot it, though, simply giving him a nod and looking to Bruce for confirmation. Bruce nodded, and she said, "All right, then. I'll be back in a few minutes to clean that cut up."

Once they were alone, Bruce gave Clark a weary, stern look and said, "Clark, please don't bite the doctor's head off. She's only doing her job."

"I'm not leaving," Clark snapped.

"You still don't trust me?" Bruce asked tiredly. Not that he'd _blame_ Clark if that was the case, but he wasn't above a bit of emotional blackmail if it would help him get the _real_ Clark back.

"I trust _you_ ," Clark said, unexpectedly. "I just don't trust anyone else around you."

_That_ was a surprise, and Bruce wasn't quite sure how to respond to it. He was still trying to figure out what to say when Clark reached out to gently touch his stomach, just beside the reddened, swollen flesh from the infected cut, and said quietly, " _This_ is what you let people do to you, Bruce. This is why you need me to take care of you."

The doctor chose that moment to come back in, armed with a rolling tray of instruments and medications. Bruce had had infected wounds cleaned out before - usually by Alfred, with a lot more swearing than the doctor indulged in, and he made a note to tell Alfred that _she_ was a lot more professional than _he_ was - but experience didn't make it any less unpleasant. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling as the doctor worked, ignoring the discomfort.

"This is an unusually severe infection," she said, as the cold touch of a swab made him shiver. "Can you think of anything that might have put your body under more stress than usual lately? That can exacerbate infections."

Bruce made a light humming sound in the back of his throat. "I haven't been following my usual routine lately."

"That might do it," the doctor agreed. Something probed the wound, and Bruce bit back a yelp. Clark reached for his shoulder, squeezing lightly in an attempt to comfort him, and his face moved into Bruce's line of sight for a moment. There was an odd sort of _guilt_ in his eyes, and Bruce realised that the idea that a change in his routine had made the infection worse was making Clark think it was _his_ fault.

Good. That would make it easier for Bruce to do what needed to be done.

The doctor finished cleaning out the wound and packed it with sterile gauze, taping a fresh bandage over it. She stood up then, saying, "I'll send a nurse in with your antibiotics and care instructions, Mr Wayne. _Follow them_ this time."

"He will," Clark said. "Thank you, Doctor."

They were left alone then, and Bruce was too tired to bother making conversation. Clark seemed to realise that, and didn't push him; he just sat by the bed, one hand on Bruce's shoulder, his thumb gently brushing over Bruce's collarbone.

Minutes or hours later - Bruce had lost track of time, and over the last few days, his ability to track time passing had been eroded by isolation and fever - there was the sound of a light throat-clearing, and a tall young man with dark hair and blue eyes, wearing a nurse's uniform, smiled at them from the door.

Seeing Dick like that hurt suddenly. It felt like he was seeing who Dick might have become if Bruce hadn't come into his life - never mind that Dick had never shown any interest in medicine, or that his life had turned to a darker path _before_ Bruce had got involved, with his parents' death. It still hurt, and Bruce couldn't work out _why_.

"I have your medication here, Mr Wayne," Dick said, his tone friendly and impersonal as he hefted a thick paper bag, care instructions stapled to the top. When he handed it over to Bruce, it was heavy enough that Bruce was _certain_ it contained exactly what he'd hinted to Alfred he needed.

"Thanks," he said lightly, giving Dick another vaguely charming Bruce Wayne smile. "I can go, then?"

"You can, but be careful," Dick said. "Give yourself three or four days to start feeling better."

Translation: if they didn't hear from him in three or four days, then Bruce's plans be damned, they were going to come in with guns blazing. Bruce nodded, getting to his feet and swaying a little. It was only because he knew Dick so well that he spotted the instantly-aborted move towards him - an unnecessary one, as Clark moved to support him.

"Let's get you home," Clark said, leading Bruce out to the car and helping him into the passenger seat. Bruce kept himself awake during the drive back, as much as he _wanted_ to go back to sleep; he didn't want to risk Clark going through the bag of medication.

Clark helped him back to bed when they got back to the apartment, hovering in concern - literally, a couple of times. He brought a pitcher of water and a plastic tumbler to the bedside table and folded an extra blanket on the foot of the bed, acting so much like a hovering parent whose only child was sick that Bruce almost felt like laughing.

And then Clark's head snapped around, and his expression tuned agonised for a moment.

"Go," Bruce said, sitting on the edge of the bed and pouring himself a glass of water. "I'll be fine."

"You're sure?"

"I'm going to take some meds and go back to sleep," Bruce said. "Go help whoever needs help. The world doesn't stop needing Superman just because I got hurt."

Clark hesitated, and then leaned down to kiss Bruce's forehead before leaving via the window.

Once he was sure Clark was gone, Bruce reached into the paper bag. Sure enough, beneath the blister packs of antibiotics, there was a slim metal box. He pulled it out; the metal had the characteristic dull sheen of lead. Opening it, he looked down at the green rock pendant that he'd been making for Diana.

He closed the box and slipped it under the mattress, doing as he'd said he would and taking the first dose of the antibiotics before climbing under the blankets. He'd need sleep before Clark got back and he put the next part of his plan into play.

There was no turning back now.


	6. Digging for kryptonite on this one way street

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce makes his move. Clark's recovery begins, and Bruce refuses to admit that his recovery needs to be anything but physical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes for this chapter: more sexual activity of all sorts of dubious nature. Blood and medical stuff that is not nearly as hygienic as it should be. Bruce's stellar coping techniques.

The smell of food woke him. The irritating sense of timelessness had only got worse with the fever. Bruce scrubbed his hand over his face, sitting up in bed and eyeing Clark, who was carrying a tray laden with a plate, juice that Bruce half-suspected was freshly-squeezed, and one of the pill bottles from the bedside table. If Clark had been paying attention to Bruce's explanation of what he took and when, then it was somewhere around mid-afternoon. It was hard to tell from the bedroom, which was one of the internal rooms, and Bruce didn't have the energy to get up and check.

"You need to eat," Clark said, his tone gentle as he set the tray down on the bedside table and sat down on the edge of the bed. It looked like he'd realised the fever would have brought nausea along for the ride, at least; the food was simple stuff, toast and scrambled eggs and some sort of breakfast sausage that didn't smell strong enough to turn Bruce's stomach. He nodded to the pill bottle, saying, "You usually take this around now, and you should take some more antibiotics, too. They'll sit easier if you've got some food in your stomach."

That was true enough; a lot of Bruce's medications weren't much fun on an empty stomach. He let Clark help him sit up, pretending more weakness than he actually felt - although not a hell of a lot more. He'd have to count on the kryptonite to level the playing field when he was ready to strike. In the meantime, he let Clark put a couple of pillows behind his back to support him, ignored the way Clark's hands lingered, and took the second dose of antibiotics that the hospital had ordered.

The juice _was_ freshly-squeezed.

When Bruce set the medication aside, Clark picked up the knife and fork and said, a little hesitantly, "Let me."

It wasn't quite a request and not _quite_ a demand either. Bruce, who had refused to let Alfred help him eat when he'd fractured both his hands (and _that_ would have been fun to explain to Wayne Enterprises; Bruce Wayne had ended up going on a ski vacation and Bruce had had to make liberal use of tanning lotion when he got the use of his hands back and "returned" to Gotham) gave Clark a look that hovered between impatience and exasperated resignation and let his hands fall to his lap.

It wasn't so hard, keeping this version of Clark happy, he reflected as he let Clark feed him bites of toast, eggs, and sausage, slowly enough that the food didn't make him feel any more nauseated than he already did. Clark wanted to take care of people; that much wasn't a surprise. It was a bit much to have the force of all of that focused on _him_ , but it was easy to predict, at least, and easy to play along with. He'd had far worse undercover roles.

Eventually, Clark set the silverware down on an empty plate and put both back on the tray. He gave Bruce a smile and asked, "Feeling a bit better?"

He was, Bruce was startled to realise. Not just better for having eaten - now that he wasn't thinking about how to work this particular move of Clark's into his game plan, it became blindingly obvious - at least to _him_ \- that his _thing_ for being overpowered evidently included a _thing_ for being hand-fed, if his arousal was anything to go by.

Well, there was a way to use that to his advantage, too. When Clark came around the bed to help Bruce lie down again, Bruce let the sheets slip. When Clark's eyes flicked from Bruce's lap to his face, Bruce let a flicker of embarrassment cross his face before he schooled his features into neutrality, settling himself more comfortably on the bed.

"Bruce," Clark said softly. "It's nothing to be embarrassed about. I told you I'd take care of you."

A lack of a clear no seemed to be all the consent Clark needed in this frame of mind. He laid himself beside Bruce, one leg over one of Bruce's in a parody of pinning him down - feverish as he was, Bruce wasn't sure he'd have the strength to fight off a normal human, much less the alien demigod who'd come to live among them - and trailed his hand up Bruce's chest to rest lightly on his throat, stroking his thumb over the pulse point. Even with their agreement about choking, he seemed to have as much of a thing about Bruce's throat as Bruce did.

"Relax," Clark murmured, pressing a kiss to Bruce's shoulder as he wrapped his other hand around Bruce's cock and began stroking slowly, a movement that seemed intended more to comfort than tease, if the gentle kisses were anything to go by. "I'll give you what you want and you can rest."

With Bruce's stamina as shot as it was from the infection, it didn't take long for Clark to have him shuddering and letting out the soft little whimpers that were designed to make Clark both happy and complacent. They weren't entirely feigned; the stimulation certainly felt good, and Bruce felt too wrung-out to bother trying to keep quiet the way he often was in bed. A part of him wondered why Clark hadn't tried to take things further yet, but he answered that almost as soon as he'd asked it: with his small-town upbringing, no doubt Clark had _notions_ about how fast it was all right to take things. They probably hadn't been _involved_ long enough for Clark to broach the idea of more sex than him giving Bruce hand jobs, as ludicrous a thought as that was when he was being held captive ostensibly for his own good.

He came with a low cry that made his heartbeat thunder in his ears, and Clark gave him a soft kiss as he cleaned him up, murmuring something that Bruce couldn't quite make out over the sound of his own heart. When Clark started to get up, though, Bruce reached out and took hold of his wrist, giving him a smile full of not-quite-feigned weariness, and said, "Stay for a while. Dishes can wait."

Clark hesitated, and Bruce played a dirty card; knowing Clark wouldn't pull away from him, he lifted the hand still in his grasp and pressed an almost absent-seeming kiss to Clark's knuckles, letting out a tired-seeming sigh and admitting, "I'll sleep better."

If Clark had been in his right mind, he'd have seen through the lie, Bruce was pretty sure. Bruce had been clear about his preference for solitude in the weeks that they'd been getting to know each other. But the Clark who wanted to _protect_ someone who had no powers but kept fighting anyway only saw that man saying he wanted Clark close so he could sleep, and his hesitation melted away. He left the tray on the bedside table and moved to lie beside Bruce on the other side of the bed, clearly not wanting to make him move any more than he had to. He slung an arm around Bruce's stomach, careful to avoid the bandages, and pressed a soft kiss to his shoulder, letting out another of the soft sighs that almost made Bruce feel bad about the charade he was keeping up and the end game he had planned. Not bad enough to not see it through.

Bruce closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. Meditation techniques picked up over the course of his career as the Bat made it easy to feign the slow, even breathing of sleep, and his heart rate should be dropping accordingly, if Clark was listening. He almost snorted; there was no _if_ about it. He'd be surprised if Clark wasn't listening to his heartbeat all the time, these days.

Eventually, when Bruce figured he'd been still long enough to lull Clark into a false sense of security, when Clark had been still and quiet beside him long enough that he might be sleeping - Bruce wasn't sure if Clark actually _slept_ , if he needed that sort of reprieve like humans did - Bruce moved carefully, most of his concentration on keeping his breathing slow and even. The lead-lined box wasn't hard to get, hidden just far enough beneath the mattress that it didn't show, and he eased it out and up to rest on the bed beside his hip, taking his time to make the movement more difficult to spot.

Clark hadn't moved. Whether he was actually asleep or just so content and comfortable that he hadn't noticed, Bruce wasn't going to ask. He flipped the box open - it had been made without a catch to fiddle with, just a lid that fitted smoothly onto the lip of the bottom piece - and, in a swift movement, took the pendant out, turned in the bed, and slipped it around Clark's neck.

Clark noticed _that_. Bruce didn't give him time to respond. He reached, blind, for the tray, finding the knife by feel. He wiped it off on the sheet as he moved to straddle Clark's thighs, pinning him down with his body weight now that the effect of the green rock was sapping Clark's strength.

"Bruce," Clark gasped, his expression wide-eyed and betrayed. "Bruce, what are you doing?"

"Fixing things."

Bruce tore Clark's shirt open with the knife, ignoring the way Clark's fingers clutched at his wrists. The pendant was as large as Alfred had been able to make it without it being too gauche for Diana to be able to wear, and there were smaller chips of green rock, stepped down in size from two the size of Bruce's thumbnail flanking the pendant to glittering chips barely larger than a grain of rice. On Diana, they would reach her collarbones, the pendant itself sitting a few inches lower. On Clark, the pendant rested in the hollow where his collarbones met, and the contact so close to his throat seemed to be making it difficult for him to draw a full breath.

It wouldn't take long, Bruce told himself. He steadied himself with one hand on Clark's chest, looking down at the scar tissue. Threads of green light ran through it now, showing the depth of the infection, reaching to the edges of the discoloured tissue and God knew how deep.

"I'm sorry, Clark," Bruce said softly. Steeling himself, and hoping that the green rock would sap Clark's inhuman durability, he brought the knife down to begin cutting.

He was in luck; the knife bit deep. Clark screamed, and Bruce forced himself to ignore it. Clark's fingernails bit bloody furrows into Bruce's wrists, and Bruce ignored the pain, ignored the way his head was spinning from the fever. He wouldn't get another chance like this.

It took longer than Bruce liked, because the infection ran deep, and perilously close to Clark's heart. It wasn't the sort of operation that should be done with a knife that had already been used, or by someone whose hands were shaking from his own fever, but Bruce didn't have the luxury of taking Clark to his medical suite or waiting for his own infection to subside. If he didn't give Clark something to fight instinctively, pain that overrode conscious direction, then Clark would fight to get the pendant off, and Bruce didn't think the gold chain was _that_ strong. And he was all too aware of the timetable that Dick had given him.

More and more infected tissue was excised, and eventually Clark stopped screaming, his bloodied hands slipping from Bruce's wrists. Alarmed, Bruce fumbled at Clark's throat to check for a pulse, and breathed a sigh of relief when he found one. Clark must have passed out from shock. This much pain would be an unwelcome novelty, Bruce reflected, going back to his work; no wonder Clark had fainted from it.

Eventually, he had a bloody bundle on the sheets and the newly-reopened wound in Clark's chest showed no more signs of the glittering green that was still threaded through the excised tissue. Bruce put down the knife, noticing with some unease how much his hand was shaking, and stood up, intending to clean up before he used the flip phone that Clark had let him keep, since he'd steadfastly _not_ used it to do anything except make a second call to Wayne Enterprises on the third day to make sure a planned payment to the Doomsday Victims Fund was still going through.

He hadn't expected to be so depleted that he lost his footing two steps away from the bed, crashing to the floor. He lay there for a moment, stunned, and then let out a shaky laugh, saying to himself, "If we both end up dying _now_ , Alfred's going to kill me."

Things got a little murky, then. His vision wasn't cooperating, and the hot, sticky sensation on his side told him he'd torn the butterfly bandages keeping his wound closed when he fell, but the pain was distant. Unfortunately, so was the bureau where the phone sat, and the room seemed inordinately dim, lit only by the green glow of the pendant still around Clark's neck.

How long could he survive with that on? Bruce had no idea, and he had no desire to find out. He needed to get to the damn phone, so he could call Alfred and let him know that he needed a car sent over. But his legs weren't cooperating.

There was a sound from the rest of the penthouse. Bruce wasn't sure how much time had passed, but it _felt_ like too long. He turned onto his side, reaching up to the tray on the bedside table and fumbling for the fork. It wasn't the knife, but it was _something_. He wasn't going to let someone come in and take advantage of Clark's weakness.

Dick appeared in the doorway and froze. Then he sighed, "Oh, _Bruce_ ," and called over his shoulder, "In here, Diana!"

Dick didn't wait for Diana; he came over to Bruce and knelt at his side, taking the fork from him and saying gently, "It's okay, Bruce. Diana's here, and we're going to take you both home. I've got you."

Diana entered the room then, dressed in civilian clothing rather than the armour she'd been wearing when they fought Doomsday. She went over to the bed, and Bruce forced himself to sit up, ignoring Dick's hushed warning, and called out, "Don't take the pendant off until we know he's him."

Diana's expression was too sympathetic for Bruce's liking when she looked at him. He ignored it, watching her tear strips off the cleanest part of the bottom sheet and bind Clark's chest with it, businesslike. Neither she nor Dick asked why Clark had a gaping wound in his chest, why Bruce's hands were covered in blood - Clark's and his own, from the gouges Clark's fingernails had raked in his forearms. Neither of them asked _anything_. Dick just picked up the bag of antibiotics and tucked it into his jacket, and then bent down to help Bruce stand.

"Come on, Bruce," he said quietly. "Let's get out of here and get you both looked at."

They had a car downstairs - and they'd done _something_ to empty out the building, because nobody interrupted them, even though it was evening, right when everyone should be coming home from work. Dick and Diana shared a glance when they got down to the car, and then Diana carefully bundled Clark into the back seat, buckling him in without dislodging the pendant, while Dick helped Bruce into the front passenger seat.

Bruce knew what it looked like when people treated people like victims. He didn't like the feeling. He was too tired to protest about it, though; he just sat wearily in the car while Dick drove them back to the lake house.

Alfred was waiting for them, and Lois, and Martha. Bruce managed to instruct them to take Clark to the medical suite, treat his wound and keep the pendant on until he woke up and they could see whether he was himself again, and Diana, Martha, and Lois disappeared into the lake house. Which left Dick and Alfred looking at Bruce, who was trying to decide if he had the energy to get to his room or if he was going to sleep in the car.

There was a question he wanted an answer to, though.

"How did you know where we were?" he asked.

Alfred and Dick exchanged a glance, and Dick shrugged. "I stuck a bug and tracker in with the antibiotics."

A tracker was fine. A bug... Bruce swallowed. There was a _lot_ they could have overheard.

"About what you heard," he began, and Alfred shook his head, leaning into the car to help Bruce get out.

"We'll talk about it later," he said, his tone too gentle for Bruce's comfort. He did _not_ like this new development of being treated like he'd _suffered_ something.

Alfred and Dick flanked him, helping him up to his bedroom, and Dick said, "We should take a look at your side and bandage your arms. Is that okay?"

Bruce made an impatient sound. "Since when do you ask if it's _okay_ to fix up injuries?"

Dick and Alfred exchanged a glance, and Dick vanished into the bathroom, probably to fetch the first aid kit that Bruce kept there. Alfred sat on the side on the bed, something he hadn't done since Bruce was young, and helped Bruce take his shirt off, his lips thin with his effort to keep quiet when Bruce was so obviously irritated. He peeled the bandage back, and Bruce couldn't help but see the flash of worry in Alfred's eyes when he saw the state of the cut.

"What on _Earth_ did you do?"

"Clark's wound gave me the idea," Bruce said, gazing up at the ceiling. His vision was beginning to go grey at the edges. "He can’t fix an infection; he had to take me to the hospital. It was the best way to arrange a rendezvous."

Alfred sighed. "Next time, try to arrange it without nearly giving yourself blood poisoning. Try to rest, Bruce. We won't do anything about Mr Kent until you wake up."

Reassured by that, and too wrung out to keep himself awake any longer, Bruce let unconsciousness take him.

 

When he woke, the bedroom was dimmed, his arms were bandaged, and there was an IV taped in his left arm. Dick was asleep on a cot in the corner. Bruce explored his stomach with his fingertips; there was a clean bandage taped there, and the wound didn't feel quite as painful as before. Whether it was actually getting better or whether there were painkillers in the IV bag along with what was probably saline and antibiotics, he didn't know, and it was difficult to care right now.

He felt less unsteady, at least, as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and got to his feet. He could walk without wavering, at least, even if he was using the IV pole for support just a little. Moving quietly to avoid waking Dick, he slipped out of the room and headed to the medical suite.

Martha and Lois were both there, sitting by Clark. Both got to their feet when Bruce entered, and Martha asked, "Should you be up, Bruce?"

"I need to see him," Bruce said quietly. "We need to come up with a management plan."

"I can't believe I didn't notice something was wrong," Lois said, guilt shining in her eyes. "I'm so sorry, Bruce."

"No," he said sharply. "It's not your fault. It's not _anyone's_ fault. He's been sick. But I'm worried about keeping the pendant on him while he's hurt. It took sunlight for him to heal before."

"It also took a few days for him to wake up," Lois said, her tone turning thoughtful. "Maybe we take the pendant off long enough for him to heal out of the coma and then put it back on when his brainwaves alter into sleep."

It was a reasonable idea, and they couldn't come up with anything better, even with Alfred and Dick joining them an hour later - and almost scolding Bruce for getting out of bed. Someone would always be with Clark, and as soon as the monitors showed a change in his brainwaves, they would put the pendant back on. When he woke, they'd see whether he was back to himself again.

Nobody made proper mention of what Dick and Alfred had heard, and Bruce wasn't sure whether Lois and Martha were aware of it. For their own sakes, he hoped not. What they _knew_ was enough to deal with; he didn't want them to have to deal with knowing what else Clark was capable of under the influence of this sort of infection.

He still avoided talking about it with Alfred and Dick. It had been a matter of survival for both himself and Clark, as far as Bruce was concerned. There was nothing more to say about it.

 

After only a day of being bathed in sunlight, Clark rose out of the coma he'd fallen into under the onslaught of so much pain and physical trauma. The wound had healed over enough to not be a gaping hole in his chest anymore, although it wasn't any easier to look at. Bruce was the one sitting with him, still hooked up to the IV, and he looped the pendant back around Clark's throat, trying not to feel an odd sense of betrayal as he did so.

Once out of the coma, Clark woke surprisingly quickly. Bruce had just finished dressing after a shower that had been an exercise in frustration, trying to deal with the IV, when Lois came to his room, knocking urgently but waiting politely for him to answer. They were all walking on eggshells around him, and it made him uncomfortably suspicious that she, at least, was aware of what had happened while he'd been Clark's "guest". Hopefully Martha remained ignorant.

"He's awake," she said, when he opened the door. "Martha's with him now, and she thinks it's him, but I thought you'd want to know as soon as possible."

"Thanks," Bruce said. "I'll be down in a minute."

"Bruce." Lois almost reached out, but she stopped herself, and Bruce swore internally. She _definitely_ knew what had gone on during that not-quite-a-week of captivity. She swallowed and said quietly, "Nobody would blame you if you didn't want to see him. Clark wouldn't."

"I'll be down in a minute," Bruce repeated. Lois hesitated, and then gave him a nod and a smile, retreating.

Damn it. Bruce hated weakness, and he _hated_ being treated like he was weak.

He took a few more minutes to let Lois finish her retreat, drying off his hair and making sure the bandage on his side hadn't been dislodged during his shower. Properly dressed and still using the IV pole for support more than he liked, he made his way to the medical suite, where Martha was holding the hands of a tired, bruised-looking Clark and both of them were speaking in soft tones.

Someone - Alfred, probably, Bruce thought - had cuffed Clark's hands to the bed rails as a precaution when he started waking. Bruce hadn't been there for the discussion of _that_ particular necessity, and that grated, but he could understand why; his perspective could be considered compromised.

After so long around the Clark who had been suffering from the infection, the change in his bearing was glaring. Bruce watched from the doorway for a few minutes, and the difference between the Clark who took what he wanted and the Clark in the bed, holding onto his mother's hands as though they were a lifeline, hurt to see. _He'd_ done that to Clark.

And then Clark seemed to become aware of him, looking up and over to the doorway, and the guilt and horror that crossed his face were too overt to fake. Bruce had got very, very adept at reading emotions, real and feigned, over the years, and Clark had very little guile in him.

"It's good to see you awake," Bruce said, moving further into the room. "Martha, we can take off the pendant and cuffs. He's not affected anymore."

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Clark asked, his voice subdued. "You, of all people, know how dangerous I can be."

"I know how dangerous you choose not to be," Bruce said. By now, he was at the side of the bed; he reached down and carefully took the pendant from around Clark's throat, lifting the green rock away. There was a bruise where the pendant had rested, and Bruce resisted the urge to try to soothe the irritated skin.

The keys for the cuffs were on a table nearby; he retrieved them and undid the cuffs, since Clark either hadn't recovered his strength enough to snap the chains or wasn't willing to. Bruce set the cuffs aside, and then asked Martha, "Could I speak to Clark alone for a few minutes, please, Martha?"

Clark was silent as Bruce released him, and silent as Martha left. He only spoke when the door closed behind his mother, closing her out of the conversation.

"Mom told me you worked out what was going on," Clark said, and his voice sounded like he expected Bruce to hit him. Maybe he did; it wasn't that outrageous an expectation, after the last few weeks. Clark swallowed and continued, "I owe you more than my life, Bruce. I owe you my soul."

"How much do you remember?" Bruce asked, sitting down next to the bed. Clark's gaze flickered from the IV bag swinging from the pole to the bandages on Bruce's arms and swallowed, and that expression of mingled guilt and horror crossed his face again.

"It's like remembering what you did in a fever," he said, then let out a broken little laugh. "If the stories are right. I don't know what having a fever is like. It's not all clear. I remember some things, and then there are huge patches of haze where I don't know what went on." He swallowed again, convulsively. "I know what I did to you, though. Bruce, I-"

"You were sick," Bruce said flatly. "If you're looking to me for blame, you're not going to get it."

" _Bruce_." Clark's tone was agonised. "You don't have to martyr yourself for me. I've taken enough from you."

"There was enough of the real you that I knew you weren't going to hurt me," Bruce said. "I never once thought you were going to do anything I told you _not_ to."

"I didn't give you the chance to say no," Clark argued. "I _drugged_ you. You're telling me you're okay with that?"

Bruce shrugged a little. "I've done worse for people I care about less. You were _sick_ , Clark, and I used your feelings to play you. I knew exactly what I was doing. Feel as bad as you need to, but don't feel like I'm blaming you."

He got to his feet, then. Clark looked tired, _he_ was exhausted, and this was going to take more than one conversation to deal with. He leaned down to squeeze Clark's shoulder lightly and said, "Get some rest. We'll talk more later."

Clark's expression was dubious, and he said quietly, "Yeah. We will."

In the face of that expression, and the fact that Clark seemed to have joined the ranks of people looking at Bruce like a _victim_ , Bruce retreated back to his bedroom.

He wasn't the one who'd had a chunk of flesh dug out of his chest. He wasn't the one who'd had his very personality changed because of an infection, who'd nearly had his life ruined because of it. He'd just done what he'd had to do to bring Clark back.

He wasn't a goddamn victim. He didn't need people looking at him like they were waiting for him to break.


	7. It's all right, you can all sleep sound tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark is back to normal, and wallowing in guilt. Bruce doesn't appreciate people acting as though he should be broken. A discussion with Diana helps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for this chapter: some more discussion of rape, trauma, and the management thereof.

Bruce knew he was dreaming.

The room was a mix of Bruce's bedroom at the lake house and the bedroom in the apartment, the edges lost in shadows that made it impossible to tell how big the room actually was. He was lying on the bed, cushioned by more pillows than he'd ever bothered indulging in, feeling almost like he was in a nest rather than an actual bed. The thing that made it clear it was a dream, though, were the ribbons braided lightly around his wrists, trailing over the sheets to wrap around the bedframe. Bruce had experimented with bondage a few times, usually in the pursuit of information, but he'd never tried _ribbons_.

"Comfortable?"

Clark's voice came out of the shadows, low and smooth, as he stepped out of the darkness shrouding the edges of the room. He was dressed in the farm-boy clothes he'd worn on that first visit to the lake house after he got better, looking as though he'd just got back from pitching a load of hay into the barn, or whatever it was you did on farms.

Bruce shifted on the bed, and the ribbons threatened to come undone. Clark raised an eyebrow, and Bruce went still, letting his wrists fall back to the sheets by his hips. Clark smiled and came to sit on the edge of the bed, reaching out to almost idly stroke his hand over Bruce's stomach.

Another clue that it was a dream: there was no inconvenient wound to keep Clark from exploring Bruce's stomach as much as he wanted to. His hands were warm, sliding slowly over Bruce's skin, and it was difficult to keep still, to keep the ribbons from slipping free, but Bruce had taught himself self-discipline a long time ago. The ribbons stayed exactly where they'd been put as Clark's hands moved from Bruce's stomach to his chest, and Clark leaned down to kiss him, breathing, "Good. Do you want more?"

Bruce nodded, leaning up into the kiss, and chuckled when he felt the light tickle of more ribbons dancing over his throat. Clark kissed him for another moment and then sat up, showing him the lengths of ribbons in his hands. Three of them, at least a yard long, knotted together in the middle instead of at the end.

Clark's fingers moved swiftly, braiding the first several inches of ribbon on each side of the knot, and then settled it behind Bruce's neck, the knot sitting neatly in the middle of his hairline, flat enough to not be uncomfortable. The braided sections met in the hollow of Bruce's throat, where Clark began to braid the two ends together, tying off what ended up being a foot-long leash attached to a braided collar that snugged his throat without feeling tight.

Bruce couldn't help laughing. "Clark, this is _ridiculous_."

Clark kissed him again, an almost bashful look on his face, and murmured, "Baby steps."

Bruce woke up still with that echoing in his mind. Baby steps. Was that where he was going wrong, when it came to trying to make Clark see that he shouldn't be eating his heart out over what had gone on between them? Was it wishful thinking that Bruce thought that playful, teasing bondage was more like the sort of thing he could see Clark indulging in if he ever got past his guilt over what had happened?

It was two in the morning. Dick and Alfred had let him take the IV out earlier that day, but the antibiotics the hospital had given him to take orally were still due to be taken for another week or so. Still, not being shackled by IV pole should have felt freeing. It didn't, not with their worry pressing in on him everywhere he went.

The house felt oppressive, bearing down on him, and eventually he made his way to the Cave, where he found Diana going through a workout routine. He stood by the elevator and watched her move, staying silent as she worked; for the last few days, everything had reminded him of weakness, of sickness and vulnerability. Nothing had been about _strength_ , even Clark, who should have embodied strength. Diana had a supple strength about her that he'd noticed even before he'd known that she was more than just a human, and there was something comforting about it.

When she began to show signs of winding down, Bruce held out a towel to her. She gave him a nod of thanks, taking the towel and starting to wipe herself down, and asked over her shoulder, "How are you feeling?"

In a way, it was easier to be honest with Diana. She wasn't Alfred or Dick, to take Bruce's suffering personally; she wasn't Lois or Martha, to be hurt by what Clark had done. He considered the question, and then, letting out a quiet sigh, said, "I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be handling this."

Diana finished towelling herself off and sat down on a bench, patting the spot next to her. Bruce sat down beside her, and Diana asked quietly, "What's bothering you?"

Bruce sighed again. " _Everything_. Alfred and Dick are acting like I should be reacting worse than I am. Lois and Martha - I don't know what they know, I don't want to _ask_ what they know, but they should be focusing on helping Clark deal with this, not worrying about _me_. And Clark... I don't _want_ him to beat himself up about it. I sure as hell don't want anyone _else_ to give him trouble over it. I knew what I was doing, and I knew he was sick. It's not his fault."

Diana was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "I understand all that, and I'm not saying you should see yourself as a victim. But this is hard for the people who love you and Clark, Bruce, and it's hard for Clark, because of who he is. You're remarkable, and remarkably capable, but you _are_ human. Clark isn't, and he's had to think about what a misstep could do for his whole life. Now he's seen the fact of that, and it's hard for him to accept your word that it's not as bad as he fears."

Bruce half-turned to look at her. "Did you have that trouble too?"

She shrugged. "Not growing up. All my people are as strong as I am, so I never had to worry about hurting anyone who wasn't as strong as I was. But when I came to the world of man for the first time - there were accidents here and there," she admitted. "I hurt a few people, entirely without meaning to, because I didn't know the difference between how strong I was and how strong they were. It's the difficult part of being what Clark and I are. And as much as we respect you and what you can do, we _are_ stronger than you. It's hard not to be afraid that we might hurt you without meaning to."

Bruce ruminated over that. He could accept it; it was just physiology that Diana and Clark were stronger than him. He didn't take it personally.

"As for Lois and Martha, and Dick and Alfred..." Diana gave him a wry smile. "Dick and Alfred are your _family_ , Bruce. Lois and Martha are Clark's, and they care about you, too. They're all kicking themselves that they didn't notice something was wrong earlier. They're blaming themselves for letting things get as far as they did, and wondering if you're keeping back some of what really happened in order to protect them. You _do_ have a tendency to keep things to yourself, you know."

Bruce let out a huffy laugh. "I'm used to secrecy. Alfred and Dick know that."

"They do," Diana agreed. "Which is why they worry. What we _know_ went on is bad enough; they're concerned that you've got deeper wounds than you're letting on."

Bruce narrowed his eyes. "What you _know_ went on? You heard?"

"I was here when Dick got back from the hospital," Diana explained. "They called me in as soon as Alfred realised you'd gone missing." She gave him a sympathetic smile that didn't grate as much as pity would have. "I'm sorry I overheard what you would have preferred to remain private, but Dick and Alfred wanted to be sure they'd know to move in if something was going terribly wrong."

Bruce got to his feet, going over to the bank of computers in the Cave. It only took a moment to find the recording, and a couple of keystrokes to delete it. The log showed too many views, and he wasn't sure whether that had been Dick or Alfred, but he understood either way; he knew what it was to torment yourself by listening to something that tore at the heart. There had been a recording of Jason's screams, once.

Diana watched him delete the recording without comment, and then said mildly, "I was wondering when somebody was going to do that. Alfred has been down here every night, beating himself up for not protecting you better."

Bruce made a rude noise. "It's not his job to protect me."

"Does he know that?" Diana's voice was soft. "Does Dick? Do you think they'd accept that, if you told them? They love you, Bruce. Let them help. Don't let them convince you that you're a victim if you don't feel that way, but let them help."

Bruce eyed her. "I've heard this before."

"Then maybe you should have listened," Diana said tartly. " _Men_. Steve would have liked you," she added, almost to herself. "You'd have been terrible influences on each other."

"All right." Bruce waved a hand dismissively. "Putting Dick and Alfred aside for now, what do I do about Clark? I keep trying to convince him that I don't blame him, but I don't think he believes me."

"Clark doesn't think the way you do," Diana said. "I haven't got to know him the way you did before things went south, but I know him well enough to know that he thinks of sex less casually than you seem to. I'm not criticising you _or_ him when I say that, but he's been raised a certain way, and he thinks of some things as less forgivable than you do. I don't think he's getting that you're not upset the way he would be."

That made sense. Bruce had figured, on that last day in the apartment, that Clark hadn't pushed things further because of his more conservative stance on sex. He hadn't considered that that might be what was standing in the way of Clark accepting that Bruce wasn't holding his behaviour while he was sick against him.

"You don't happen to have a psychology degree, do you?" he asked, glancing sideways at Diana.

She laughed. " _You_ try hanging around for a hundred years and not picking up a thing or two about the way people think," she said. "We know you're not weak, Bruce. That's why it's so frightening for the people who are used to seeing you as strong and in control to see you hurt as badly as you were when we brought you back home. Just give them some time to get over the shock, let them fuss a bit while you're still hurting, and they'll go back to normal when you're feeling better."

Bruce sighed. "I _hate_ giving things time."

Diana laughed again. "You _definitely_ would have been a terrible influence with Steve," she said, her tone fond as she stood up. She squeezed Bruce's shoulder lightly. "I should get back to work, but you know where to find me if you need to talk."

Bruce gave her a smile, the first _proper_ smile he'd given anyone since Clark had spirited him away to the apartment, and stood up. It was late, but he'd noticed that Clark had been keeping semi-nocturnal hours, taking advantage of the sunlight to both sleep and heal. It might be a good time to talk.

He was in luck; Clark was awake, and the medical suite was otherwise empty. Bruce lingered in the doorway for a moment, watching the Kryptonian, who was lying in the bed, a book in his hands that he was clearly not reading. He just stared at the pages, a haunted look on his face.

"Clark," Bruce said quietly, coming into the room and closing the door behind himself. "We should talk."

Clark swallowed and put the book aside, shifting in the bed so that he was sitting up properly, facing Bruce. It was obvious that he expected Bruce to finally stop pretending that everything was all right and let him have it, and thinking more about how Clark saw the world now, Bruce could understand why.

"Let me go first," Bruce said, taking a seat next to the bed. "With the exception of whatever went on when you drugged me, I know what you did. I know you're thinking of that as rape, and all right, legally speaking, it might have been. But _I_ don't see it that way. Tell me what you did that I don't remember, and we'll see if I still feel the same way."

Clark let out a shaky sigh. "After I cauterised your leg wound, stitched your stomach wound, and wrapped your knee, I held you down and I jerked you off," he said, his voice shaking a little. "I thought... I remember thinking that you needed someone to take care of you, and that you _liked_ being controlled like that, but I wasn't sure, so I needed a way to check without you remembering if it didn't work. That's why I used Rohypnol."

Bruce nodded. The thought process made sense. He said, "All right. That doesn't change how I feel about what happened, Clark. I'd been noticing that things were off for a little while, but I hadn't been sure _what_ or why. If I'd been afraid of you, I would have taken steps sooner."

"Just because you knew something was wrong doesn't make it your fault," Clark said, his tone sharpening for a moment. Bruce couldn't help smiling; of course Clark would take it that way.

"I didn't mean it like that," he said. "But you're so busy trying to convict yourself that you're forgetting that a part of what makes it rape is how _I_ feel about it. I don't feel violated. Maybe if I hadn't used sex to get what I needed before, I'd think differently, but I don't think of sex the way you do, Clark. It was a means to an end for me. And I honestly didn't believe that you'd do anything I told you not to. Was I wrong?"

Clark hesitated, and then said, sounding almost reluctant, "No. I didn't want to _hurt_ you. But you don't understand, Bruce. I didn't _care_ that it was wrong. I just wanted what _I_ wanted."

"I understand _that_ just fine," Bruce said, his tone a little sharp. "The kryptonite was exacerbating your self-interest. I figured that out once I knew it was an infection, and it didn't bother me. What's bothering _you_ , Clark? That you wanted to protect me even if I didn't want you to, or that you wanted to sleep with me?"

Clark swallowed convulsively. "What I did to you was wrong."

"Sure. What I did to _you_ back when Luthor was playing his game was pretty wrong too, but you seem to have forgiven me," Bruce countered. "Do I get to forgive you, or is that your thing?"

"That's not fair."

Well, at least Clark was protesting, Bruce figured. Snapping him out of the self-loathing was the first step.

"Look." Bruce leaned forward, snagging Clark's wrist to keep the Kryptonian from drawing back. "Was it something I would've done under any other circumstances? Of course not. But I wasn't raised the way you were; if sex is going to help me get what I want, then I'm okay with it not being ideal. I'd rather go through something unpleasant than lose someone I care about, and that was the choice I was facing. I'm sorry if that's made things difficult for you."

Clark let out a disbelieving laugh. " _You're_ apologising to _me_? Bruce, do you even hear yourself sometimes?"

Bruce sighed. "Would it help if I promised to talk to someone?"

Clark's gaze sharpened. "You mean like Mom is?"

Bruce shrugged. "Sure. I'll track down a therapist, if it'll reassure you that I'm not just repressing some trauma or anything."

"I think..." Clark licked his lips, looking hesitant and hopeful all at once. "I think that might be a good idea. Mom thinks I should talk to someone as well. Not the one she's seeing, since there might be a conflict of interest, but... someone."

"As long as you're clear with them that you were acting under the influence of an infection," Bruce said. "But sure. Sounds good."

There was silence for a moment, and Bruce took that moment to swear at himself for having promised something he'd dodged for years, but he wasn't going to walk it back now. Maybe it'd help Dick and Alfred relax, too.

"So," he said eventually, breaking the silence. "You were pretty single-minded about me. You want to talk about that, or should we pretend it never happened?"

For a few moments, he thought Clark was going to ignore the question. Then Clark sighed and said, "You don't have to do that, Bruce."

"Jesus Christ, Clark." Bruce was almost amused at the slightly shocked look on Clark's face; it wasn't as though he'd never said worse curses in front of the man. Blasphemy was unexpected, apparently. Bruce ran a hand through his hair, frustrated, and said, "Look, can we just work under the assumption that right now, I'm not doing anything I don't want to be doing and _talk_ about this?"

Silence, again, for long minutes, and then Clark said quietly, "You shouldn't be having this conversation with someone who's done the things I did to you, Bruce."

" _Clark_." Bruce was starting to lose patience, and he felt bad about that, but if people were going to insist on treating him like a victim, they could damn well indulge him when he wanted to talk about something. "If you don't want to talk about why the version of you who had no inhibitions wanted to have sex with me, we don't have to, but don't try to fob me off by saying _I_ shouldn't be talking about it. I'm the only one who gets to make that call."

Clark sighed. "You're going to be stubborn about this, aren't you?"

"I gave on the therapy idea, I get to have my way on this," Bruce said flatly. Clark looked almost amused, mixed in with a big dose of resignation.

"All right." Clark sighed again, rubbing a hand over his face. "It's not like the idea of being attracted to another man is _new_ to me, if that's what you're thinking is bothering me. I'm not _that_ sheltered, and Mom and Dad weren't that small-town. Smallville's not the most progressive place, but I had a couple of gay classmates in school. So that's not the issue."

"Okay." Bruce nodded, trying to look encouraging. "So what's bothering you? That you cheated on Lois? She'll understand that you weren't in your right mind, Clark."

Clark let out a soft little laugh. "It's not that either. We've - talked. We need some time apart, but we're good. It's just been a lot for her, the last couple of months, and what I said to her - it didn't come out of nowhere. That's what's so hard to handle about all of this, Bruce. The infection might have unlocked some of my inhibitions, but it didn't make me do anything that I hadn't thought about before. So the things I said to Lois were things that I might have said to her another time, when I was myself but we were fighting, and the things I did to you..."

"Look." Bruce leaned forward, his gaze intent. "The only thing that _I'm_ not okay with is that you didn't _ask_ , Clark. Are you freaking out because your subconscious is kinkier than you thought it was?"

Clark looked uncomfortable, and Bruce sighed, reaching out to pat his shoulder lightly. He said carefully, "I'm not exactly vanilla, Clark. If a part of you has been thinking about doing not-exactly-vanilla things with me, well, there are worse things to fantasize about. Don't beat yourself up about _that_ , okay?"

Clark's throat worked, and Bruce squeezed his shoulder lightly, deciding that that was enough for one day. They'd made progress, and even if Bruce wasn't really looking forward to finding a professional to unburden himself to, maybe it would make everyone happier. He could sacrifice a bit of comfort to make them feel better.

"We'll talk more later," he promised, getting to his feet.

"Yeah." Clark's voice was a little absent, and his brow was furrowed; Bruce could practically see him turning over their conversation in his mind, trying to come to terms with everything they'd said. "We will."

It didn't feel patronising or placating this time. Bruce gave Clark a smile and left the infirmary, heading back up to his room. He'd get a few more hours of sleep and then tackle Alfred and Dick.

And if he had another weird ribbon-bondage dream, well, like he'd said to Clark, the only thing that really bothered him, on reflection, was the fact that Clark hadn't been overly interested in consent. They weren't nightmares this time. Bruce knew the flavour of his own dreams, and what he'd woken up from an hour ago had been gentler and more benign than the dreams of a god tearing his heart out. That, more than anything, told him that _he_ was going to be okay.

Now to make sure everyone else was, too.


	8. If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce talks with Alfred and Dick, and has his first session with a new therapist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dr Anne Carver, Silver St Cloud, and Veronica Vreeland are all comic book characters, with whose comic backgrounds I am taking extreme liberties.
> 
> Content notes for this chapter: trauma. So much trauma. Very little of it to do with Clark, actually. Some discussion of Jason's death, and Bruce's coping mechanisms (or lack thereof) since then.
> 
> The next chapter may be a little delayed, as I've got a convention coming up over the Easter weekend. Hopefully not, but I wanted the warning to be there in case :)

"Alfred," Bruce said, coming into the kitchen, where Alfred was stabbing at a pan of eggs with a viciousness that made Bruce wince. "Do we still have Dr Carver's contact details?"

Anne Carver had been a psychiatrist working at Arkham, before she was attacked by a patient known only as Jane Doe. She worked private practice now; safer, and less likely to involve criminally-insane people attempting to take over her identity. Arkham's loss was the gain of the upper class of Gotham. And, right now, Bruce's gain. The Bat had spoken to Dr Carver a few times, and Bruce had liked what he'd seen. If he was going to see a psychiatrist, there were worse places to start than her.

Alfred dropped the wooden spoon he'd been stabbing the eggs with. Looking flustered, he picked it up and tossed it into the sink, looking over his shoulder at Bruce. "I believe so. Dare I ask why?"

Bruce shrugged, going over to the fridge and getting out the orange juice. "I talked with Diana and Clark last night, and they brought up some good points. You and Dick are worried about me, and I suppose I can understand why. I'm going to make an appointment with Dr Carver."

Alfred narrowed his eyes, turning to watch Bruce, who poured himself a glass of juice and sat down at the island counter. "You want to make an appointment with Dr Carver."

Bruce snorted. "No, I don't particularly _want_ to, but even I can only keep the blinkers on for so long. If I want you and Dick - and everyone else - to stop pussyfooting around me like I might break, then I need to start dealing with things instead of compartmentalising them."

"You know therapy is only going to work if you want to be there," Alfred said carefully, like he was aware that it might sound like he was trying to talk Bruce out of something he'd been trying to talk him _into_ for ages.

Bruce shrugged. "If nothing else, it'd be kind of nice if I stopped having nightmares."

Alfred sighed, and, unexpectedly, came over to give Bruce a quick, hard hug before turning his attention back to the eggs. Over his shoulder, he said, "I'll call Dr Carver's office today and arrange an appointment for you."

Bruce smiled to himself, taking a sip of his orange juice. Alfred _would_ take charge of making the appointments from there; no way for Bruce to pretend he'd done it, that way. He let the silence sit for a moment before saying, quietly, "It _will_ be all right, Alfred. I'm not hurt any worse than I have been before, and it was to get Clark back. It was worth it."

Alfred made a dismissive noise. "You could have every bone in your body broken and you'd find a way to think it was worth it, Master Bruce," he said, his tone ever so slightly acid. "Martha seems to think Mr Kent is back to his old self, if somewhat subdued, so perhaps we can say it paid off, if not _it was worth it_."

" _Martha_ , hmm?" Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow. "Well, I think she's right. Don't give him grief about what happened, all right? He was hurt just as much as I was. Just because it wasn't as physical for him doesn't mean it didn't hurt."

Alfred was quiet for a moment, and then sighed, scooping eggs out of the pan and adding them to a plate that already held bacon and toast. Setting the plate in front of Bruce with a look that said Bruce had better eat it without complaining, he said, "All right. You understand why..."

He trailed off, and Bruce reached over to touch his wrist lightly, just for a moment. They weren't demonstrative, never had been; Bruce had been too standoffish in his grief, as a young boy, to allow that sort of physical intimacy to develop, and their affection had become a physically distant one into adulthood. Touching, outside of cleaning up injuries, was a rare thing, and recognised for what it was.

"I understand," Bruce said quietly. "And I'm going to be all right. But part of that is maintaining a friendship with him, and I want you to be able to be okay with that. Don't think about Clark as the one who hurt me. I don't hold him accountable for it any more than you've held me accountable when I've been affected by fear toxin. Altered states of mind make things complicated."

"That they do," Alfred said, letting out another sigh. "I understand what you mean, Master Bruce. It might take some time, but you say he's back to normal, his mother says he's back to normal - I'll take it in good faith that he's back to normal."

"He was prepared to take a spear to the heart for us," Bruce said, giving Alfred a bit of a smile. "Think of him that way, if it helps."

Alfred snorted. "It doesn't. It just makes me think he'll be a _terrible_ influence on you. Eat your breakfast, Master Bruce," he added, turning to load the pan into the dishwasher. "And ready yourself for a discussion with Master Dick. I don't think he plans to leave until he's satisfied himself that you're going to be all right, and he might be harder to convince than I am."

 

Bruce found Dick in the cave, going over the weapons rack with a single-minded thoroughness that made Bruce stop and watch him for a moment. Dick had always been scrupulous about keeping his tools of the trade in peak working condition, but it had been a long time since Bruce had seen him at work, going over blades for sharpness and nicks, tugging a length of rope between his hands to check it for weakness, oiling leather fixings to keep them supple and strong. It was at least partly Bruce's own fault that he and Dick didn't live together anymore, he knew; that didn't stop it from hurting as he watched.

After a few minutes, Dick said, without turning, "I know you're there, you know. You even _breathe_ ominously."

Bruce chuckled softly, moving further into the cave and going up beside Dick, taking one of the throwing knives that Dick hadn't got to yet and carefully running his fingers over the blade. He chewed through throwing knives at a ferocious rate, losing them to the hard stone corners of Gotham's buildings. This one had a couple of nicks in it, but they weren't bad, and he wasn't particularly worried about having perfect throwing knives, considering they usually just went into criminals; he set the knife aside to sharpen later, to smooth out the nick a bit.

Beside him, Dick practically hummed with tension. Bruce stayed quiet; in his experience, letting Dick come out with whatever was bothering him was usually better than assuming he knew what the problem was and steamrolling ahead without confirming that that was _actually_ what was upsetting Dick. The silence was a tense one, but Dick would break it when he was ready.

" _God **damn**_ it, Bruce."

There it was. Bruce put down the knife he'd been examining and turned to face Dick, whose hand was curled around the handle of a cattle prod, tight enough that his knuckles were going white. Dick wasn't looking at him; his gaze was fixed on the wall in front of them, on the carefully-hung weapons.

"I get that he was sick," Dick said, his voice tight. "I get that you wanted to help him. But damn it, Bruce, if I'd let myself get snatched without a tracker or a bug on me, you'd never have let me hear the end of it. The _minute_ you figured something was up with him - and Alfred told me about the roofies, you _knew_ something was wrong before he grabbed you - you should have at least been wearing a tracker."

"Clark would have spotted a tracker," Bruce said half-heartedly. He hadn't expected Dick's objections to take this route.

"You're telling me you don't have trackers Clark wouldn't have noticed?" Dick asked, turning his head now to look at Bruce. "You did back when I worked with you. A molar tracker, or an ear bug. It might've been awkward to get the tech out after, but we'd have known where you _were_."

"I mis-stepped," Bruce said, feeling a little awkward. He wasn't used to having to answer to anyone except Alfred, and even then, answering to Alfred was a very different dynamic to answering to Dick.

Dick spun around and jabbed him in the chest, snapping, "You didn't _think_ , Bruce. You just decided to throw yourself on the grenade without thinking about what it was going to do to the rest of us."

 _That_ accusation hit too close to home, because it was true; Bruce hadn't considered what it would be like for Alfred to come back into the study to find Bruce gone, what it would be like for Dick to get the call from Alfred that Bruce was gone. Considering Martha and Lois were here, he hadn't considered what it would be like for them to find out that Clark had actually abducted someone, much less that he'd abducted _Bruce_. He'd just told himself that he could handle the sacrifice and gone along with it.

"I thought..."

What? That because _he'd_ decided the sacrifice was worth it, everyone else would automatically understand?

Not even that. They hadn't even factored into his calculations, except that he needed to keep Clark away from Alfred, because Alfred was liable to do or say something that might spur the possessively protective Clark into violence. He'd only considered Dick as an ace up his sleeve, a secret weapon that Clark hadn't known about.

"You can't work like a lone operative anymore, Bruce," Dick said, his tone quiet now. "You lost the right to do that when you decided to make me your family. Just because we're not working together much these days doesn't mean what you do doesn't affect me. I wouldn't go off on my own like that, not without letting you know that something might be going on. You owe me better than that, you owe Diana better than that now that she's working with you, and you damn well owe Alfred better than that."

For all Dick's tone was quiet, it was vehement, and the passion in it floored Bruce. He'd forgotten how much Dick _felt_ things, in the time they'd been apart, and the part that stung was that he couldn't disagree with anything Dick was saying. He couldn't say that the eventual outcome would have been any different, but ten years ago he would have told Alfred more about what he expected, and he would have taken more precautions when it came to Clark's altered behaviour.

"Bruce." Dick reached out to touch Bruce's shoulder lightly. "I miss Jason too. But you've gone distant ever since he died. It's not good for you. It's not good for any of us. And ignoring basic safety protocol because you don't want anyone else to get hurt isn't going to bring him back. It's just going to hurt the rest of us when you get stuck badly enough that you need our help and we don't know where to find you."

Bruce's heart seized in his chest, and he bit the inside of his cheek hard. He didn't talk about Jason - it was one of the things that had come between him and Dick, in the end. But there was no denying that since Jason's murder, Bruce had been more and more reluctant to involve anyone else in his work. Alfred handling security was about all Bruce could stomach these days, because so much of his security involved Alfred staying in their security suite, well out of the line of fire.

Maybe that hadn't been a fair reaction.

He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. Sometimes he was afraid that he was going to forget Jason's face - or that the only way he'd remember him was the way he'd been at the last, beaten and broken. Relief swelled when Jason's face, smirking and sassy, rose from his memory, and he opened his eyes to look at Dick again.

"You're right."

The surprise in Dick's eyes said that he hadn't been expecting assent. That was no surprise, as much as Bruce hated to admit it; he hadn't exactly been willing to listen to this sort of thing before. But it was past time, wasn't it? If his tendency to act entirely on his own had led to hurting the people he cared about this badly, then it was well past time.

"Alfred's making an appointment with Dr Carver for me," he said, giving Dick a half-smile. "I guess I should find a way to bring up this... martyr complex... with her without going by the way, I'm the Bat."

"Martyr complex." Dick snorted. "Sounds about right. Who called it that?"

Bruce winced. "Clark, more or less."

Dick laughed softly. "Nice. Maybe I could get to like the guy. You're serious about this counselling idea?"

"I'm going to give it an honest shot," Bruce said. "That's all I can promise."

Dick squeezed his shoulder lightly. "That's all we want, Bruce."

The silence stretched again, but this time it wasn't tense. Bruce still felt that tight sensation in his chest, Jason's ghost still hovering, but the tension between him and Dick had vanished.

"Well." Bruce stretched, giving his healing wound an experimental prod. "Run through a workout with me. I don't want to have to work back from the beginning when I'm healed."

Dick laughed again, giving him a look that was a mix of fondness and exasperation. "A _gentle_ workout, old man," he said, teasing. "If you tear that wound open again, Alfred's going to kill us both."

 

Clark, healed enough that the bandage was gone from his chest, left the lake house a few days later. He hesitated on the deck before moving into Bruce's personal space; aware that it was, probably subconsciously, a test, Bruce didn't flinch back, and he was slightly surprised to find that he didn't _want_ to. Clark laid a hand on Bruce's shoulder, squeezing carefully and lightly, and said, his tone saturated with so much sincerity that it made Bruce wonder how the man had ever made it in journalism, "Thank you, Bruce. For everything."

When Clark moved back, it was Martha's turn, and _she_ didn't hesitate to hug Bruce. He'd grown used to her tendency for demonstrativeness by now, and it had ceased to bother him; like her son, she was sincere, with no subterfuge or ulterior motive about her. He returned the hug, giving her a warm smile, and said, "Be well, Martha."

Clark flew them both back to Smallville; he'd said that he needed to take some time to himself, and was planning to talk to one of the doctors in a town nearby. The therapist that Martha had been seeing to cope with her abduction at the hands of Luthor's men would have a recommendation, she'd said, and spending some time back home would be good for Clark. Bruce hoped that it worked; as much as he'd been afraid, not so long ago, that the world would end up coming under the thumb of the super-powered being from space, he was now surer than ever that the world needed Superman. Even in the grips of an infection making him self-absorbed and intent on what _he_ wanted, Clark had gone out to help people. That core of goodness was a part of him, and Bruce needed to believe in it.

Lois had left several days earlier; like Clark had said, she and Clark needed time apart to sort out what each of them wanted. Words that came from a place of truth, even when they were said in extremity, could often wound deeper than words that were said to hurt and lacked the sting of truth; only time would tell whether they could come back from what Clark had said to her while he was infected. Bruce had no doubt that Lois would _forgive_ him for it, but there was a deep chasm between forgiveness and a return to normalcy.

Alfred had made the appointment with Dr Carver, as he'd said he would. Now, the day after Clark and Martha had returned to Smallville, Bruce found himself in her small, tastefully-appointed waiting room, idly wondering if anyone had recognised Bruce Wayne going into the building.

To hell with them if they did. He'd faced worse tabloid scandals than the possibility of seeking mental health treatment. Hell, some of the tabloids had been gossiping for years about when he was finally going to lose it, between his ward's death (his chest tightened again; he swore at himself for having thought of Jason, but he was going to have to bring him up in one of these sessions, sooner or later) and being at ground zero during Gotham's portion of the destruction wreaked during Zod's attack. Bruce had been steadfastly ignoring them. Maybe that had been part of the problem - he'd dismissed the _tabloids_ talking about his mental health, so he'd automatically dismissed any other discussion of it as well.

"Mr Wayne? You can come in now."

Dr Carver looked almost exactly how Bruce remembered her from his last conversation with her as the Bat, if a little lighter around the eyes, a little less tense. It was a shame that Arkham had lost a doctor like her, but it was better for her, being away and working in the private sector, and she'd been helpful to the Bat in the past; he liked her for that. He'd done some digging since he'd agreed to see her, and finding out that she spent one day a week at a free clinic in the poorer part of Gotham made him like her even more.

He gave her a smile as he entered her room, eyeing the décor. No doctor's couch, at least; that was a relief. She gestured for him to sit down in one of the comfortable armchairs, taking her own seat at the desk, where she could make notes on a notepad, and asked, "What would you like to discuss, Mr Wayne?"

Bruce was quiet for a moment, trying to work out what to say, how much he could tell her. She'd helped the Bat, which meant that she could be trusted at least a little, but it was one thing to trust her to give him solid information and entirely another to trust her with his identity. On the other hand, in his digging he'd discovered that she was scrupulous about the privacy of her patients, even when the paparazzi realised she was treating some of Gotham's elite and attempted to buy scandal from her. His particular scandal was probably bigger than most, but if she'd resisted being offered the sort of money magazines would pay to hear what Silver St Cloud and Veronica Vreeland were spilling in her offices, then maybe...

He shrugged off the thought. He could cross that bridge if the first few sessions worked.

"I need to be up-front for a minute," he said. She raised her eyebrows and nodded, gesturing for him to go ahead, and he continued, "I'm not going to be able to be one hundred per cent honest with you. Is that going to be a problem?"

She smiled. "Mr Wayne, none of my patients are _one hundred per cent_ honest with me. As long as you're honest with what you're here to get my help with, you can have as many other secrets as you like."

Well, that made it easier. He relaxed in the armchair and said, "It's come to my attention that I've been repressing a lot of things and should probably be talking to someone about that."

"I'm aware of some of the troubles you've had, but why don't you go through what you'd like to discuss with me?" Dr Carver asked. Sneaky, Bruce noted. If he left something out that she knew about, she'd be able to make a note of it. But he appreciated that she was letting him set the pace for now.

He let out a long exhalation, eventually saying, "You're probably aware that one of my wards was murdered by the Joker, then."

Dr Carver's lips thinned, and Bruce realised that she would have dealt with the Joker; she'd been working in Arkham during his tenure there. She didn't reveal her thoughts on the matter, though, saying instead, "Yes, I heard when that happened. You haven't talked to anyone since that happened, I take it?"

"Not as such." Bruce managed a self-deprecating smile. "Not at all. My other ward recently called my attention to the fact that since then, I've been going to what might be called suicidal lengths to protect the other people I care about."

"Not an uncommon grief response," Dr Carver said, her tone gentle enough to be reassuring but not so gentle that it felt condescending. "It's a little uncommon for the grief response to be ongoing this long, but if you never talked to anyone about it, it's understandable. Especially when you consider the trauma of the Zod event two years ago."

Bruce grimaced. "I might have reacted badly to that as well."

Dr Carver raised an eyebrow. "Were you one of the people burning effigies of Superman?"

"No," Bruce said slowly. At least he hadn't fallen as far as mob justice.

"Then I think you can stop being so hard on yourself, because beating yourself up over your responses and emotions is unhelpful," Dr Carver said. "Your feelings are your feelings, and there's no point in being ashamed of them or trying not to feel them. What matters is how you react to them."

It was standard talk, Bruce knew. He also knew that he'd promised to try, so he didn't dismiss it out of hand. He nodded, letting out another sigh.

"I guess we'd better start digging."


	9. Even heroes have the right to dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martha invites Bruce, Alfred, and Dick over for Thanksgiving. With the benefit of some time between what happened, Clark and Bruce have a talk about where they want to go from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your comments and kudos; they have been very encouraging during the process of writing this. I'm sorry that it's ending, but this feels like an organic end to this particular story. I still have ideas for BvS, though, so keep an eye out :)
> 
> Content notes for this chapter: sex of a non-dubious nature, finally!

Time moved on, as was its habit. Dick went back to Bludhaven for a few days, to wrap up his business there and transfer back to Gotham; he'd evidently decided that he and Bruce had reached a point where they could try to see each other more often, although they'd both agreed that it was probably a good idea for Dick to get his own place in Gotham, rather than live in the lake house. It was a start. Bruce, aware of his promise, kept giving his sessions an honest shot, and gradually, talking to Dr Carver felt more and more natural.

He told her about Jason, and talking about him hurt, but it felt like rebreaking a badly-set bone; it was painful, but it would heal cleaner in the end. The Joker had killed him so publicly, in his Robin suit, that it had been impossible to hide that he'd been working as a vigilante, but Bruce and Dick and Alfred had managed to keep any suspicion away from Bruce, who had played the gobsmacked, out of his depth playboy to perfection.

"So many people were shocked to find out your ward had been working with the Bat. You had no idea?" Dr Carver asked one afternoon, glancing up at Bruce.

"Jason had a lot of secrets," Bruce said quietly. "I still wish I'd been able to protect him."

That was a theme that came up in a lot of their sessions. Even without admitting that he was the Bat - although he was starting to think that she suspected - he managed to talk about the things that had upset Dick and Alfred so badly, that he was starting to realise were signs of a deeper problem.

"You feel like you failed Wallace Keefe," she said, in another session. "You set up a fund for the employees of Wayne Enterprises who were injured, you had a more than generous payment set up for them - it wasn't _your_ fault that Lex Luthor used him to strike at Superman."

"I should have known he wasn't cashing the cheques," Bruce argued. He never let her have a point without arguing it, even when she usually won. She had the training, after all; he just had more tenacity than was good for him.

"Not cashing the cheques was his choice, Bruce," Dr Carver said gently. "There should have been more support for him in the wake of such a traumatic event, but that wasn't your responsibility or your fault. You can't hold yourself responsible for someone else's choices."

In between sessions, he kept working out, building his strength back up after the infection. Eventually, the stitches came out and all that was left was an ugly-looking scar, one more to join the other marks on Bruce's body. Diana humoured him and pulled her punches, and he took it in the spirit it was intended; she was strong enough that she _wasn't_ a smart workout partner, but Alfred wouldn't strip down and sweat with Bruce, and Dick was still working. Bruce, still on semi-vacation from Wayne Enterprises - something he'd been informed of by Alfred - had too much time on his hands and too much energy to work out, and Diana was willing to help him with it, at least.

Eventually, he had to tell Dr Carver about what had spurred the decision to come talk to her in the first place. A friend of his had been sick, he said. A psychotic episode, because that was the easiest way to explain it. He hadn't realised it at first, but when he did, he knew that however out of character his friend was acting, he wasn't going to _hurt_ Bruce.

"I'm hearing a lot of justification," Dr Carver remarked.

"I let him have sex with me so that he'd stay in a good mood," Bruce said. "More or less. Nothing penetrative happened, and I _don't_ think of it as rape, but now that he's doing better, he sees it that way, and so do the other people who've found out about it."

"How do you see it?"

Bruce shrugged. "He was sick and it was a way of helping him," he said. "I didn't think he was going to hurt me. I don't feel traumatised about it."

Dr Carver was quiet for a moment, and then sighed and said, "Bruce, I think we need to address your need to sublimate your own desires and wellbeing in order to protect people."

It was difficult to tell whether she was hinting at knowing the truth about him, and he hesitated, not sure whether he should tell her or not. She said, "I don't want to pry into your secrets. But I've got to know you over our sessions, and there's a carrying theme in everything you've been saying, Bruce. Other people matter more than you do. And while compassion and willingness to act for others is commendable, if it goes to the sort of extents that it seems to with you, well, I can understand why your family are starting to get concerned."

_"You could have every bone in your body broken and you'd find a way to think it was worth it, Master Bruce."_

_"You just decided to throw yourself on the grenade without thinking about what it was going to do to the rest of us."_

Bruce gave her a weak smile, Alfred and Dick's words echoing in his ears, and said, "I think I'm starting to see their point."

 

Days ticked by. September marched into October, and October turned to November, and eventually, Bruce saw Clark's name in the by-line of a Daily Planet article. Another puff piece, the sort that Clark was secretly tired of writing, but Bruce picked it up and read it. It was about Wayne Enterprises' donations to the funds set up for the victims of Zod's attack, for the victims of Doomsday's destruction, and Bruce wondered how hard Clark had had to argue that it was something people would want to read about. It was presented as "the side of Bruce Wayne that the tabloids don't want to acknowledge", and as Bruce read it, he felt himself starting to smile.

And then, in the middle of November, Martha called to invite Bruce, Dick, and Alfred to Smallville for Thanksgiving.

Dick and Alfred had, apparently, got to know her in the days that Clark was convalescing in the lake house and Bruce was refusing to admit that he might need help dealing with anything. She asked after them during the phone call and managed to extract a promise from Bruce that they'd at least come spend the day in Smallville, if not the night - Bruce had the impression that the farmhouse was big, but he wasn't sure it had enough room for three overnight guests without putting someone on the couch, and that didn't seem like something Martha was going to be willing to do.

Dick dropped by one evening, leaning against the counter and watching Bruce chop up vegetables for a stir-fry. After a few moments of a silence that felt more companionable than awkward, he asked, "Are you okay with this Thanksgiving plan?"

Bruce thought it over, transferring the vegetables into the pan, and said, "I think so. It's been weeks, and..." He sighed. "I _miss_ him, Dick. Is that stupid?"

"I don't think so." Dick shrugged, leaning over to steal a bit of carrot. "You guys were friends. Are friends. And he seems like a nice enough guy, the whole... Kryptonite poison thing aside. It'd be nice if you could get back into the swing of working together. As long as you're going to be okay going over there."

Bruce chuckled. "It's not like I'll be going without backup."

Dick's answering laugh was light, and Bruce felt something in his chest loosen, a tightness that had been there for so long that he'd forgotten to notice it and had learned to breathe around it, and his son said, "No, you sure won't."

They headed down the morning of Thanksgiving, taking a couple of pumpkin pies that Bruce and Alfred had made the night before to the background noise of Dick complaining that making the lake house smell like pie without letting him _have_ any was cruel; they'd figured pie should stand up to the trip all right. Smallville was tinier than any town Bruce had ever been in, and he felt like he _should_ feel out of place there, like a billionaire had no place amongst farmers and shopkeepers, but something about the place just radiated welcome.

Martha met them at the farmhouse door, giving Bruce the by-now expected hug and taking the food from Dick, ushering them inside. She said over her shoulder, "The hired men have the holiday off, of course, so Clark is taking care of their usual work before we eat. He'll be in shortly."

Bruce could picture Clark doing farm work, as effortlessly as Clark did everything else. He gave Martha a warm smile as they all entered the farmhouse, glancing around and taking in the details of the place where Clark had been raised and shaped into the man who would take a monster's claw to the chest to save the world.

It was a comfortable, homey sort of place, with high ceilings and big, airy rooms, the sort of rooms that were made to hold huge family gatherings rather than made to look ostentatious. Bruce wasn't sure if it was Martha's taste behind the decorating or the father that Clark sometimes talked about with the sort of tone that Bruce recognised as speaking of someone who'd died, but the furnishings and décor was tasteful and comfortable, battered from a lifetime of invulnerable child leaping at the world with Clark's characteristic fearlessness. Martha led them into a cosy living room, and Bruce could see the imprint of a tiny hand on the skirting, where a toddler might have reached out as he fell while learning to walk. He tucked the image away with a smile, saving it to remind himself of Clark's essential humanity in the moments where Clark's powers bothered him.

When Clark came in, he was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, his hands and bared forearms damp from a recent washing. Bruce couldn't help looking at those hands, remembering the strength behind them. Clark _looked_ like a strong man, even without his superhuman abilities, but Bruce had personal experience with Clark's strength, and not all of the memories were unpleasant ones.

It was good to see Clark again.

Clark's greeting was friendly but restrained. He gave Bruce a warm smile as they headed into the dining room - "Mom's set it up special, since we've got company," Clark said as an aside - but he never came within arm's length, whether by accident or by design. Still, the tension between them had bled out during the weeks they'd spent away from each other, and when Martha directed everyone to sit, Bruce found himself across from Clark, a not uncomfortable place to be.

Bruce's relationship with Thanksgiving had always been a complicated one. The first few years after his parents' murder, Alfred had tried to keep things normal, but Bruce had refused to tolerate the holiday. By the time he was fourteen, they'd dispensed with the pretence altogether. When Dick, and later Jason, came along, Bruce attempted to give him a semblance of normalcy, but that tradition died when Jason did. Since then, with Dick and Bruce's strained relationship and no real extended family to speak of, Bruce had dismissed the need to acknowledge America's so-called favourite holiday.

Clark and Martha clearly didn't have that problem. They moved around the room with the ease and comfort of long tradition, passing dishes off to each other as they arranged the table family-style, so everyone could serve themselves. Bruce had never been envious of families before, and he wasn't really _now_ \- his life didn't lend itself to the sort of life that Martha and Clark had - but it was nice to watch. Sometimes it helped to remind himself what he was fighting for.

Martha, Alfred, and Dick did most of the heavy lifting as far as conversation went. Clark and Bruce contributed when it was pertinent, but Clark seemed to be enjoying the company more than anything else, and Bruce was getting more amusement than he'd thought watching Dick's micro-expressions as _he_ watched Martha and Alfred chatting.

Bruce had seen those micro-expressions before, when Dick had been a surprisingly sentimental adolescent who'd entertained daydreams about his mentor getting together with Dick's favourite middle school teacher. It _was_ nice to see Alfred talking to someone with as much animation and interest as he was talking with Martha. Bruce had become aware, in the last few weeks, just how much _his_ choices affected the people around him, and he wondered sometimes whether Alfred might have been happier if he'd worked for someone other than the Waynes. He couldn't bring himself to regret it, though. Alfred's help over the years had been invaluable.

He and Alfred shooed Martha and Clark out of the kitchen when the meal was over, Bruce explaining, "You cooked and hosted; we'll wash up. Dick, go be good company."

"Yes, sir," Dick said, giving Bruce a lazy salute and a grin, and followed Martha and Clark back into the living room, leaving Alfred and Bruce to do the dishes.

 

 

Later that afternoon, he found Clark out in the barn, looking through a telescope. Bruce lingered at the head of the stairs to the hayloft for a few moments, watching Clark pretend to stargaze. After a couple of minutes, he said quietly, "Today's been nice. I've missed spending time with you."

Clark didn't turn, but he straightened up, resting one hand lightly on the telescope. "It's good to see you so well, Bruce."

"I could say the same about you." Bruce moved away from the stairs, approaching, and laid a hand on Clark's back. The other man startled a little, but he didn't pull away; he leaned back a little, pressing back into Bruce's hand, and let out a soft sigh, a tension that Bruce hadn't noticed until now melting out of him. Bruce was quiet for a moment, and then said softly, "Can we talk, Clark?"

Clark let out a little laugh, and Bruce smiled; the laugh sounded genuine, and it was a sound that he realised he hadn't heard from Clark before. Clark turned, giving Bruce a slightly rueful smile, and said, "It seems like that's all I've been doing lately. But sure. We can talk."

"I've missed you," Bruce said. "But I didn't want to push before you were ready. I figured Martha wouldn't have asked us here if you weren't okay with it."

Clark laughed again. "I think she got tired of me moping around trying not to push _you_. But you're right; she wouldn't have invited you if she'd thought I wouldn't be okay with it."

Bruce stayed quiet, letting Clark talk. It was nice just hearing his voice while there _wasn't_ a crisis going on.

"I've been talking to someone," Clark said after a moment. Bruce nodded, making a quiet remark about how he'd been doing the same thing, and Clark continued, "I think I'm doing better about what happened. I'm still working on it, but... all the things that were driving you crazy, I'm doing better about them."

Bruce couldn't help it; he laughed softly. "You mean you're not just thinking about me as someone you hurt anymore? That's a good step."

Clark _blushed_. It was an intriguing look on him, and Bruce found himself transfixed, even as Clark ducked his head, trying to hide how flustered he was. There was a moment of silence, and then Clark admitted, "No, that's... not how I've been thinking about you lately."

It was a gamble, considering how careful Clark was with everyone and the issues that had risen between them in the last few months, but Bruce had never been a man who held back because something was a gamble. Moving his hand from Clark's back to his shoulder, he leaned in to give him a light kiss, more reassuring than challenging.

"Bruce," Clark breathed into the kiss, pulling back just enough to look at Bruce. "Are you sure? My strength-"

"Is part of what I like about you," Bruce interrupted. He slid his hands down to lightly grasp Clark's forearms, still bared by the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and moved Clark's hands to rest on Bruce's upper arms. There was a flash, an instant, where they both remembered Clark holding onto his arm back in the lake house, leaving bruises on his arm and on his throat, but Clark's hands on his arms _now_ closed just firmly enough to be a comforting presence, with no threat of bruising.

Clark's expression was torn between hope and confusion. Bruce kissed him again, and said, "I _like_ strength, Clark. I'm attracted to it. I don't meet a lot of people who are stronger than I am, and most of the people who _are_ aren't the sort of people I want to invite to bed." He laughed softly. "My cynicism at work, maybe. But you - you're the sort of person I'm attracted to _and_ you're the sort of person I can trust."

Clark's hands on his arms tightened just enough to be a pleasant sort of ache, still not hard enough that Bruce was anticipating bruises later. They could talk about that sometime, maybe, but he wasn't going to push his luck right now.

"You know how to be careful," Bruce said. "You would have died for the world. You're not going to hurt me."

That, apparently, had been the right thing to say; Clark took the initiative this time when he kissed Bruce, still tentative but with more enthusiasm than he'd shown before. Bruce let Clark walk him back a few steps to press him against the barn wall, his hands still firm but cautious on Bruce's arms. Bruce could tell that Clark was in territory he wasn't used to, and he wasn't going to push. Whatever Clark was comfortable with would be fine, and honestly, he'd been thinking about this long enough that just kissing Clark, not quite pinned against the wall, was plenty to be getting on with.

"How much do you want?" Clark asked eventually, pulling back from the kiss and resting his forehead against Bruce's. "I know this isn't what you're used to."

There were a couple of ways to take that, and Bruce deliberately chose the way he was pretty sure Clark hadn't meant, because like hell he was going to say anything that might make Clark think he was inadequate. He let out a little chuckle, lifting his hand to curl through the hair at the back of Clark's head, and murmured, "It's my first time in a barn, true."

That got a laugh from Clark, and a light, quick kiss before Clark asked, "Do you _want_ to do more here or should we try to sneak past Mom to one of the bedrooms?"

Bruce winced. "I don't want your mother catching us. It's kind of a mood-killer. Or Alfred. _Or Dick_."

Clark laughed again and gave Bruce another kiss, this one almost fond. He pulled back then, saying, a little regretfully, "Rain check? Sometime when we're not entertaining."

"Come for dinner on Friday," Bruce offered. "Like you did before. Just... don't leave as early."

 

 

Clark _did_ arrive on Friday night, five minutes after he must have finished work at the _Daily Planet_. He was still wearing his Clark Kent clothing, and the incongruity of what was supposed to be a harmless, bookish reporter hiding the strength that Bruce knew lay beneath the surface was an oddly arousing one.

Bruce had given Alfred the night off. Alfred had given him a look that had said he'd known exactly what Bruce was up to, but he hadn't protested. Thanksgiving had been nice, and Bruce had promised to check in. He understood that Alfred's trust would be slow in returning, and Clark, when Bruce explained that he'd need to text Alfred a couple of times through the night, seemed to understand it as well. They weren't the only ones who had scars from the last few months.

Bruce had cooked, the same simple, homey, earthy sort of food that he'd realised Clark preferred. Fancy food was all well and good, and Clark could appreciate it, but there was something to be said about the sort of food he'd grown up on, and Bruce enjoyed the change. Conversation over dinner was the same comfortable, easy talk that they'd had in the early weeks after Clark's injury, before the infection had properly set in, and Bruce found himself relaxing as the evening wore on.

Relaxing enough, apparently, to mention the stupid little ribbon bondage dream.

They'd been talking about what they might be able to experiment with. Clark had said he wasn't sure he was comfortable with the idea of the more extreme bondage just now, and Bruce, too comfortable to choose his words as carefully as he did the rest of the time, had come out with, "Well, we could always try the ribbons I dreamed about that time."

Clark had been raising his glass of sparkling juice when Bruce said that. He paused for a moment, and then took a slow sip, clearly trying to work out what to say. As he set down his glass, he managed, "...pardon?"

Bruce could feel himself blushing. "It was something that I dreamed about, after we had our first talk when you woke up. I think I'd figured that you might be more okay with the idea of bondage if a part of it was under my control."

Clark took another drink, looking considering, and said eventually, "It's a decent compromise, actually. If you can get out of it whenever you want and it's not my strength holding you down... I think that's probably a good idea for the first time." He paused for a minute, and then chuckled. "Do you even _have_ ribbons?"

"I do not have ribbons," Bruce admitted. He was prepared for a lot of things, but random ribbon bondage wasn't one of them.

Clark smiled, finishing his drink and standing. He leaned over to give Bruce a kiss and said, "Head upstairs. I'll be back in a few minutes."

It was encouraging to see Clark taking that sort of initiative; Bruce had been concerned that he was just going along with what Bruce was suggesting out of some sense of obligation. As Clark headed out to do whatever he had planned - to get ribbons from somewhere was the logical answer - Bruce put their dishes in the sink to soak and went up to his bedroom, shedding his shirt as he crossed the threshold to his room.

Clark arrived via the French windows a minute later, a bag from a craft store in his hand. He set it on the bedside table and kissed Bruce again, saying, "You'll need to walk me through this a bit. All I've got so far is ribbons."

"Tie a length around my wrists with a loose knot," Bruce instructed, settling onto the bed and holding out his hands. "They'll be slippery enough that if you keep the knot loose, I'll be able to pull free if I want to."

Clark nodded and reached into the bag, and Bruce laughed as Clark drew out a spool of two inch-wide, satiny ribbon in a bright red colour, dotted with little black bats. In a way, he was glad Clark had gone for the ridiculous; he instinctually knew that they needed to keep things light-hearted tonight. Clark wanted to explore the less conventional aspects of Bruce's tastes, and he wanted to explore his own unexamined tastes, but the ordeal they'd both suffered during Clark's infection was still too raw for them to delve _too_ seriously just yet.

Clark wound a loop of the ribbon around Bruce's wrists, knotting it loosely. He pressed Bruce back onto the mattress, guiding his hands up above his head and tying the end of the ribbon to the headboard, making _that_ knot tight enough to be secure. Bruce settled his arms comfortably, aware that if he moved his hands too much, the knot would slip free.

Clark settled beside him then, tossing his own shirt aside and pressing a light, almost absentminded kiss to Bruce's cheek as he began to explore Bruce's body with his hands and lips.

Like everything Clark did, he did this with a single-minded focus and a care that made it obvious how aware he was, every moment, that he could seriously injure any human around him without even thinking about it. Bruce held still as Clark ran his hands lightly down his chest, pausing over every scar to press a soft kiss to the mark. He unconsciously went to sit up when Clark kissed the scar on his side that he'd given himself, but Clark reached up to press one hand gently over Bruce's collarbones, reminding him to hold still rather than actively holding him down, and Bruce relaxed back onto the bed, biting his lip as the gentle attention, combined with the self-imposed inability to move, sent little electric thrills though him.

Eventually, Clark hooked his fingers in Bruce's waistband and said, "Let's get rid of these. Hips up."

Amused at how comfortable Clark seemed with giving orders, at least, Bruce lifted his hips to help Clark tug his slacks off, keeping his upper body still, the ribbon tickling the inside of his wrist. The lights weren't _blazing_ , but they weren't dim either, and once he was naked, it was obvious how the exploration Clark had been doing had been affecting Bruce.

Clark hesitated for a moment, starting to say, "Bruce, do you want to be on..."

Clark's blush was enough of an indication of what he was trying to ask, and Bruce laughed. "I'm not making you bottom for the first time while I'm tied up and can't prep you properly," he said, his tone light and not quite teasing. "I can talk you through it if you need me to, but I'm fine with you being on top, Clark."

Clark's blush intensified, and he muttered, "I'm not _that_ much of an innocent. You've got lube?"

"Top drawer," Bruce said, nodding towards the bureau. Clark fetched it and returned to the bed, rubbing Bruce's thigh lightly, his fingers hesitating for a moment over the burn scar. He bent to press another kiss to the scar, the way he'd been kissing all Bruce's scars - and there were a lot of them to kiss - and then settled between Bruce's legs, popping open the tube of lubricant.

Holding still enough to keep the ribbon from coming undone proved to be difficult with Clark's fingers inside him, but Bruce was determined not to let that ribbon come undone unless he _wanted_ it to. He wrapped his fingers around the knot to hold it firm and gave Clark as much encouragement as he could, letting out little pleased sounds every time Clark moved his fingers.

Clark took a lot longer about preparation than most of the other men Bruce had had sex with. Not that there'd been anything wrong with most of them; Clark just had that core of care about him. Where Bruce was used to enough to make sure the sex was fun, Clark seemed to be making foreplay an event in itself. He'd worked two fingers into Bruce, and he kept twisting and crooking them, rubbing over Bruce's prostate again and again, until Bruce gasped, "Jesus, Clark, do you _want_ me to come before you fuck me?"

Clark gave him a bright, benevolent smile, dragging his fingers over Bruce's prostate again, and said, his tone gentle and fond, "That's exactly what I want."

Bruce couldn't say whether it was the stimulation or Clark's demeanour that tipped the balance, but some combination of the two sent him tumbling over the edge, crying out as sparks exploded behind his eyelids. He managed to keep his arms still, keeping the ribbon steady, but anything else was beyond his focus.

By the time he got his breath back, Clark had undressed and was kneeling between his legs, rubbing his hip lightly and waiting for him to refocus enough to be asked, absurdly gently, "Are you ready?"

Bruce gave him a breathless nod, and Clark leaned down to kiss him as he slowly pressed in. Clark was bigger than most of the other men Bruce had slept with, but between his careful, thorough preparation and Bruce being relaxed so soon after coming, there was nothing more than a stretch, rather than true pain.

"Don't take it personally if I take a bit longer to get hard again," he said, leaning up just enough to kiss Clark. "I'm not as young as I used to be."

Clark chuckled, starting up a slow, leisurely pace, one arm supporting himself and the other hand sliding up to rest on Bruce's throat, clearly recalling that Bruce had mentioned enjoying that. As Bruce tipped his head back in response to Clark's thumb curving up under his chin, Clark murmured, "That's okay. I can go as long as I need to to get you back in the game."

_That_ was a thought that could go somewhere a little darker another time - a little pleasantly darker, Bruce amended in his own thoughts - but right now, Bruce just tightened his legs around Clark's hips and let himself let go of the reins that he usually held tight to, even in bed.

This was different. Clark knew him, knew all the secrets he needed to. Bruce didn't need to hold back with him, and when Clark was going to the effort of exploring things that he wasn't sure about because Bruce liked them, Bruce could damn well do him the courtesy of honest reactions.

Like he'd warned, he didn't get hard again right away. He'd spent too long being hard on his body, and he was old enough, by now, that a short refractory period was a thing of the past, along with knees and shoulders that didn't ache in cold weather and hands that still moved dextrously enough to pick a lock in ten seconds. Clark didn't seem to be letting it bother him; he kept one hand lightly restraining on Bruce's throat, caressing the pulse point, and the other moved from the occasional stroke of Bruce's cock to skim lightly over his stomach and chest, seemingly more interested in just exploring as he kept up leisurely, almost lazy thrusts, as though he had all the time in the world.

It could have been mechanical; it wasn't. Clark varied his movements enough that Bruce couldn't predict them, and it was difficult enough to focus on keeping the ribbon from coming undone; he had no concentration left for anything else. Time seemed to attenuate, and the world shrank down to the bedroom, to the sensations Clark kept pulling out of him, from the hand caressing his throat to the long, slow thrusts that sent curls of arousal through Bruce's body.

"There we go," Clark murmured, when sensation overruled practicality and Bruce began to get hard again. He smiled, leaning down to kiss Bruce's throat above his hand, and said, "You can let go if you want to, Bruce."

Bruce let out a shaky laugh. He couldn't _see_ Clark very well, with his head tilted back as far as it was, and that seemed to make every _other_ sense that much more intense. He rubbed the knot of the ribbon between his fingers and said, his voice a little unsteady, "I know. I don't want to."

"You like this," Clark said thoughtfully, reaching up with the hand that wasn't on Bruce's throat to trace over the ribbon. "I wouldn't have picked it. You're so in control of everything."

Bruce laughed again, his hands closing convulsively around the ribbon, and said, "Being in control all the time is _exhausting_ , Clark. Maybe that's why I like this."

Clark was quiet and still for a moment, and then kissed Bruce softly, murmuring, "I can understand that. You relax and let me take care of you."

Letting Clark take control was different to being _passive_ \- for one thing, Bruce was pretty sure that Clark would misread too much passivity, and he'd never been the passive sort, anyway. Keeping his head tilted back to accommodate Clark's hand on his throat and keeping his upper body still to avoid dislodging the ribbon was one thing, but that didn't mean he was going to just _lie there_. He tightened his legs at Clark's hips, pulling him closer, and said, "You can go faster if you want to. I can take it."

Clark chuckled, dropping his free hand down to wrap around Bruce's cock, and sped up his thrusts, moving to a rougher, still careful pace that sent sparks through Bruce's vision every time Clark hit his prostate.

Bruce had never given much thought to romance, or the romantic notion of coming at the same time as whoever he was sleeping with. It was an almost painful shock to find himself coming the moment after Clark stilled inside him, letting out a satisfied groan against his shoulder. The surprise of it stunned him long enough for Clark to pull out and lean down to kiss Bruce, murmuring, "Hold still a bit longer. I'll grab something to clean you up."

Clark disappeared into the bathroom, and Bruce had a moment to realise that he was definitely a little sore, but it wasn't a soreness that he _minded_. He stayed still on the bed, amused at how easily Clark had slipped into giving orders - Bruce wasn't the only one with kinks he hadn't consciously thought about, apparently - and concentrated on getting his breath back.

Clark returned a moment later with a warm, damp washcloth. He sat on the bed beside Bruce and started to carefully clean him up, pressing the occasional light kiss to Bruce's stomach as he worked.

"Fuck," Bruce said, after a few moments, as Clark wiped the washcloth over his stomach. "Was that as good for you as it was for me?"

Clark was quiet for a brief instant, long enough for ice to start settling in Bruce's stomach, and then he leaned down to kiss Bruce's lips gently, saying quietly, "There are some things I'd like to explore later, that I didn't think I'd enjoy as much as I did, but yeah, it was good. It was really good."

"Things like telling me what to do?" Bruce asked, his voice taking on a teasing tone. Clark's hands went still for a moment, and then the other man chuckled, shaking his head.

"Things like that," he admitted. "I should have figured you'd notice."

"It's not a deal-breaker," Bruce pointed out, as Clark reached up to untie the ribbon around his wrists and guide his arms back down. "Hell, it'll probably work in our favour. You like telling me what to do; I like giving up control to you. It seems like a pretty good match to me."

Clark smiled, setting the washcloth aside and lying down beside Bruce, idly stroking his hand over Bruce's arm. It was a quiet moment, surprisingly comfortable, and Bruce found himself relaxing, drifting in something that wasn't sleep but wasn't quite wakefulness either, as Clark kept stroking his arm lightly, pressing soft, absentminded kisses to his shoulder.

"I like the idea of being a good match," Clark confessed, after a little while. "We'll have to figure out what we both want and what works for us both, but I like the idea of figuring that out together."

Things weren't totally fixed with them both, but they were on the road to getting there, and Bruce had a feeling that it would be easier from here on out. For the first time in a long time, he had a relationship with Dick. He had a good working relationship with Diana, he was working out how to handle his grief over Jason and the way he'd sunk himself into his work instead of his _life_. And he and Clark were on a better footing than Bruce could have imagined even a few months ago.

He shifted to wrap an arm around Clark, tugging him closer, and murmured, "Me, too."


End file.
